Piotr Piękos

Deep Learning
PhD student

01

About me

I am a second year PhD student at KAUST AI Initiative, working with Jürgen Schmidhuber. My work focuses on creating scalable methods that improve generalization and sample efficiency in problem solving by utilizing compositionality.

I believe that low sample-efficiency and weak systematic generalization are the main contributing factors to (still relatively) low adaptation of AI. The holy grail of my research is to create a method that efficiently decomposes problems into subproblems similarly to humans.

In practice, it means that I am mostly interested in analyzing and improving transformer architecture, LLMs and (goal-conditioned) reinforcement learning algorithms.

Before starting my PhD I worked for over 3 years as a ML/Research Engineer.
I studied simultaneously Mathematics (BSc+MSc) and Computer Science (BSc) at the University of Warsaw. I wrote my Master's thesis on improving BERT's mathematical skills under the supervision of Mateusz Malinowski and Henryk Michalewski

02

Publications


3 other publications (of which 2 are first author publications) are currently submitted to blind peer review conferences.

02

Experience

  • June 2023 - Aug 2023

    Research Internship

    IDSIA

    Working on sample efficient Goal-Conditioned RL and improving the speed of the Transformer.

  • Sept 2022 - Present

    PhD Student

    KAUST

    Supervised by Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber. I am working on generalization, sample efficiency in context of language processing and reinforcement learning.

  • Jan 2022 - Jul 2022

    Researcher

    AWARElab, IMPAN (Institue of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences)

    Working on AdaSubS. Implementing experiments on the sokoban environment

  • Oct 2021 - Jan 2022

    Research Engineer

    Allegro.PL

    Researching neural search methods for improving search recommendations on the Allegro.pl ("Polish Amazon") platform

  • May 2020 - Sept 2021

    Working on Master thesis

    After promising initial results I decided to focus fully on my Master's thesis, the effect of that is the Measuring and Improving BERT's Mathematical Abilities by Predicting the Order of Reasoning paper.

  • July 2017 - June 2020

    ML/DL Engineer

    ITmagination

    In ITmagination I created DL/ML solutions to help other companies. Example projects are: Object detection system for evaluating influencers, recommender system or a system to help with estimating staff needs in physical shops.


04

Contact Me

Email

piotrpiekos@gmail.com

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