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Leonard Adolphs

PhD Student

Data Analytics Lab

ETH Zurich

Biography

I am a fourth year PhD student in the Data Analytics Lab at ETH Zurich. Currently, I'm working on natural language processing and non-convex optimization.

Prior to this, I obtained a Master’s degree from ETH in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s degree from KIT Karlsruhe in electrical engineering.

A copy of my CV can be found here.

Interests

  • Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Non-Convex Optimization

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2018 - Today

    ETH Zurich

  • MSc in Computer Science, 2016 - 2018

    ETH Zurich

  • BSc in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, 2013 - 2016

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Publications

Boosting Search Engines with Interactive Agents

Leonard Adolphs, Benjamin Börschinger, Christian Buck, Michelle Chen Huebscher, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Lasse Espeholt, Thomas Hofmann, Yannic Kilcher, Sascha Rothe, Pier Giuseppe Sessa, Lierni Sestorain
PDF

How to Query Language Models?

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) are capable of not only recovering linguistic but also factual and commonsense knowledge. To …
L Adolphs, S Dhuliawala, T Hofmann
PDF

LeDeepChef 👨🏻‍🍳 : Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent for Families of Text-Based Games

AAAI 2020

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches lead to significant achievements in a variety of areas in recent history, natural …
L Adolphs, T Hofmann
PDF Code Poster Slides Video

Ellipsoidal Trust Region Methods and the Marginal Value of Hessian Information for Neural Network Training

NeurIPS 2019 Workshop: Beyond First-Order Methods in ML

We investigate the use of ellipsoidal trust region constraints for second-order …
L Adolphs*, J Kohler *, A Lucchi
PDF Poster Slides

Local Saddle Point Optimization: A Curvature Exploitation Approach

AISTATS 2019

Gradient-based optimization methods are the most popular choice for finding local optima for classical minimization and …
L Adolphs, H Daneshmand, A Lucchi, T Hofmann
PDF Poster Video

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

PhD Research Intern

Facebook AI Research

July 2022 – Present New York, USA
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Research Consultant

Google Zurich

February 2022 – June 2022 Zurich, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Research Intern

Facebook AI Research

July 2021 – October 2021 Remote
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Research Consultant

Google Zurich

January 2021 – June 2021 Zurich, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Research Intern

Google Zurich

March 2020 – September 2020 Zurich, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Student

Data Analytics Lab, ETH Zurich

August 2018 – Present Zurich, Switzerland
Research Interests:

  • Natural Language Processing
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Non-Convex Optimization
 
 
 
 
 

MSc Computer Science

ETH Zurich

September 2016 – June 2018 Zurich, Switzerland

GPA: 5.71 / 6

Thesis: Non Convex-Concave Saddle Point Optimization

Focus:

  • Machine Learning
  • Information Systems
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer

sovanta AG

July 2015 – November 2016 Heidelberg, Germany
Software Design and Development of native iOS and Android Apps for business customers.
 
 
 
 
 

BSc Electrical Engineering

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

October 2013 – August 2016 Karlsruhe, Germany

Talks

LeDeepChef 👨🏻‍🍳 : Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent for Families of Text-Based Games

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches lead to significant achievements in a variety of areas in recent history, natural language …
Dec 13, 2019 NeurIPS 2020 - KR2ML Workshop
Video

Programming Skills

Python

ML Frameworks

PyTorch, Tensorflow

R

iOS Development

Swift, Objective-C

VCS

git

DevOps

Teaching Assistant

Computational Intelligence Lab

ETH Zurich 2020 – 2021

Natural Language Understanding

ETH Zurich 2019

Deep Learning

ETH Zurich 2018 – 2021

Machine Learning

ETH Zurich 2017

Contact

  • CAB F 42.1, Universitätstrasse 6, Zürich, 8006