Samuel Ainsworth

I'm a hacker at heart, moonlighting as a Senior Research Scientist at Cruise AI Research. I completed my PhD at the University of Washington where I worked on machine learning and robotics, advised by Sidd Srinivasa. My research interests span deep learning, programming languages, and immunology. In the past I've also worked on Bayesian modeling, variational inference, deep generative models, and more.

Before joining UW I spent four wonderful years at Brown University, followed by a stint in Silicon Valley working on self-driving cars among other wild things.

My life goal is to cure spondyloarthritis. If you are experiencing SpA and would like to donate blood to research, sign up @ End AS.

You can find me on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn. Outdated CV.

Blog and news

• January 20, 2023: 📜 Git Re-Basin has been accepted to ICLR 2023 as an oral, notable top 5%!
• July 19, 2021: 📝 God Give Me a Sine: Adventures in Interval Arithmetic. A new blog post on interval arithmetic, and some of its quirks.
• March 5, 2021: Our work 📜 Faster Policy Learning with Continuous-Time Gradients has been accepted to L4DC 2021!
• Sept. 3, 2019: Our paper 📜 Mo States Mo Problems has been accepted to NeurIPS 2019!
• May 15, 2018: Excited to join Google for a research internship this summer advised by Rif A. Saurous and Kevin Murphy!

Publications

This is often out of date. Consider checking my Google Scholar profile.

Git Re-Basin: Merging Models modulo Permutation Symmetries

S. Ainsworth, J. Hayase, S. Srinivasa

ICLR 2023 Oral
[#1 highest score out of 4,849 submissions] [tweet thread] [code] [video]
Invited talks at Berkeley AI Research, Columbia, ML Collective, Pacific Northwest National Labs, Cruise, and more.

Faster Policy Learning with Continuous-Time Gradients

S. Ainsworth, K. Lowrey, J. Thickstun, Z. Harchaoui, S. Srinivasa

L4DC 2021 [code] [poster]

Mo' States Mo' Problems: Emergency Stop Mechanisms from Observation

S. Ainsworth, M. Barnes, S. Srinivasa

NeurIPS 2019 [code] [poster]

Mosaic: A Sample-Based Database System for Open World Query Processing

L. Orr, S. Ainsworth, W. Cai, K. Jamieson, M. Balazinska, D. Suciu

CIDR 2020

Disentangled VAE Representations for Multi-Aspect and Missing Data

S. Ainsworth, N. Foti, E. Fox

arXiv preprint

oi-VAE: Output Interpretable VAEs for Nonlinear Group Factor Analysis

S. Ainsworth, N. Foti, A. Lee, E. Fox

ICML 2018 [video]

Interactive Preference Learning of Utility Functions for Multi-Objective Optimization

I. Dewancker, M. McCourt, S. Ainsworth

NIPS 2016 workshop

Open source

• Founder of the @NixOS/cuda-maintainers team. Active NixOS/nixpkgs maintainer.
• rustybox is a complete, 100% Rust fork of the busybox project.
• bidirectional-typing is a bidirectional type inference implementation, including a pedagogically-minded design and readme for folks getting started with bidirectional type inference.
• remod is a user-friendly chmod replacement.
• phonetelepathy transmits data between phones using only audio. The magic lies in error correction.
• nixos-up is the fastest way to install NixOS.

And many more on my GitHub...