Clare Lyle

Hello, world!

I'm a PhD student at Oxford interested in theoretical understanding of machine learning. I've also worked on reinforcement learning. I like to write about math, computer science, and life in general. My publications can be found here.

I also occasionally blog. This blog is not optimized for mobile devices and contains a lot of long equations that will be a pain to view on your phone. Unless you enjoy suffering, I strongly recommend reading it on large screens only.

How to Win Scholarships and Influence Donors

All of my thoughts on scholarships in one place

Posted by Clare on September 25, 2021

Auxiliary tasks in RL

Maybe the real reward was the representation we learned along the way.

Posted by Clare on April 3, 2021

How do people work? Part 1: energy

From muffins to marathons

Posted by Clare on November 5, 2020

A Bayesian Perspective on Training Speed and Model Selection

As presented at NeurIPS 2020

Posted by Clare on October 30, 2020

Why I'm Learning Biology

And why yoou should too

Posted by Clare on October 5, 2020

Causality, Generalization, and Reinforcement Learning

Oh my!

Posted by Clare on July 11, 2020

In praise of the logarithm

Why are logarithms so magical?

Posted by Clare on April 20, 2020

Causality

If causation isn't correlation, then what is it?

Posted by Clare on August 9, 2019

An imPACtful, BAYESic result

Puns are great.

Posted by Clare on April 9, 2019

What makes the distributional perspective on RL different?

Stuff I did in 2018

Posted by Clare on February 8, 2019

Graphical Models

Why I shouldn't quit my PhD to enter the coffee business.

Posted by Clare on November 11, 2018

Reflections on my first month in grad school

DPhil life

Posted by Clare on November 10, 2018

A semi-coherent summary of set theory pt 2

Or how set theorists are bad at naming things

Posted by Clare on May 25, 2017

A semi-coherent summary of set theory

Or why math really really needs rules

Posted by Clare on May 20, 2017

Week 1 in Oxford

I'm in Oxford!

Posted by Clare on May 14, 2017

School starts, as do the cool proofs

Infinity is still really cool.

Posted by Clare on September 6, 2016

What Work is Worth

Or, how getting grossed out by blood was possibly the most profitable personality trait I ended up with.

Posted by Clare on August 21, 2016

First Week at Microsoft

Or how I installed more microsoft products in two days than I had in the last two years.

Posted by Clare on June 6, 2016

On Entering the Real World

Or, on getting a job at a big tech company.

Posted by Clare on May 25, 2016

A gentle introduction to infinities

Infinity is bigger than you think.

Posted by Clare on May 16, 2016

A round-up of my favourite proofs from introductory math courses

I spent a lot of time proving things this year.

Posted by Clare on April 28, 2016