Every blog post ever

Paper review: Auditing language models for hidden objectives

What's in an objective?

Posted by Clare on March 30, 2025

Can you train a neural network forever?

Understanding trainability in neural networks

Posted by Clare on December 27, 2023

Deep dive into the edge of stability

Making loss landscapes trendy again.

Posted by Clare on October 15, 2023

Evaluating understanding in LLMs

It's surprisingly hard.

Posted by Clare on August 27, 2023

When do adaptive optimizers fail to generalize?

A case study

Posted by Clare on January 29, 2023

Do we know why deep learning generalizes yet?

It depends on your epistemology.

Posted by Clare on July 30, 2022

The Importance of Making Mistakes in RL

A tale of two NeurIPS papers

Posted by Clare on December 18, 2021

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

Power to the people, but how?

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

What makes the distributional perspective on RL different?

Stuff I did in 2018

Posted by Clare on February 8, 2019

Probabilistic Graphical Models

Why I shouldn't quit my PhD to go into 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