Claire Vernade

Bio

Claire is a Research Scientist at DeepMind in London UK. She received her PhD from Telecom ParisTech in October 2017, under the guidance of Prof. Olivier Cappé. From January 2018-October 2018, she worked part-time as an Applied Scientist at Amazon in Berlin, while doing a post-doc with Alexandra Carpentier at the University of Magdeburg in Germany.

Her research is on sequential decision making. It mostly spans bandit problems, but Claire's interest also extends to Reinforcement Learning and Learning Theory. While keeping in mind concrete problems -- often inspired by interactions with product teams -- she focuses on theoretical approaches, aiming for provably optimal algorithms.

Publications

News !

  • I have been invited to be an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2021.

  • ACCEPTED AT AISTATS 2021 : Off-Policy Evaluation for Contextual Bandits: finite-time confidence intervals can be used to help choosing the best policy out of a finite set of candidates.

  • ACCEPTED as an ORAL PRESENTATION AT ICLR 2021: A Game-theoretic approach to PCA to scale it up to larger and larger datasets and distribute computation over servers.

  • New preprint: We denoise the gradient updates of EigenGame which results in a significant reduction of the variance:

  • New preprint: With Johannes Kirschner, Tor and Csaba, we prove that Information-Directed Sampling achieves both minimax and problem-dependent optimal regret in linear bandits:

    • J. Kirschner, T. Lattimore, C. Vernade, C. Szepesvári. Asymptotically Optimal Information-Directed Sampling. arXiv 2021


Other conference papers

  • Claire Vernade, Alexandra Carpentier, Giovanni Zappella, Beyza Ermis, and Michael Brueckner. "Contextual bandits under delayed feedback." arXiv:1807.02089 . ICML 2020

  • Claire Vernade*, Andras Gyorgy*, Timothy Mann. Non-Stationary Delayed bandits with Intermediate Observations. arXiv 2006.02119 ICML 2020

  • Anne-Gaelle Manegueu, Claire Vernade, Alexandra Carpentier, Michal Valko. Stochastic Bandits with Arm-Dependent Delays. arXiv 2006.10459. ICML 2020

  • Cindy Trinh, Emilie Kaufmann, Claire Vernade, and Richard Combes. "Solving Bernoulli Rank-One Bandits with Unimodal Thompson Sampling." arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.03074 ALT 2020

  • Russac, Yoan, Claire Vernade, and Olivier Cappé. "Weighted Linear Bandits for Non-Stationary Environments." In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 12017-12026. 2019.

  • Achab, Mastane; Clémençon, Stephan; Garivier, Aurélien; Sabourin, Anne; Vernade, Claire; "Max K-armed bandit: On the ExtremeHunter algorithm and beyond" ECML 2017

  • Vernade, Claire; Cappé, Olivier; Perchet, Vianney; "Stochastic bandit models for delayed conversions" UAI 2017

  • Kwon, Joon; Perchet, Vianney; Vernade, Claire; "Sparse stochastic bandits". COLT 2017.

  • Katariya, Sumeet; Kveton, Branislav; Szepesvári, Csaba; Vernade, Claire; Wen, Zheng; "Bernoulli Rank-$1 $ Bandits for Click Feedback". IJCAI 2017

  • Katariya, Sumeet; Kveton, Branislav; Szepesvari, Csaba; Vernade, Claire; Wen, Zheng; "Stochastic rank-1 bandits". AISTATS 2017.

  • Lagrée, Paul; Vernade, Claire; Cappé, Olivier; "Multiple-play bandits in the position-based model". NIPS 2016

  • Vernade, Claire; Cappé, Olivier; "Learning from missing data using selection bias in movie recommendation". IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (2015)

Patents

  • Kveton, Branislav, Zheng Wen, Yasin Abbasi Yadkori, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, and Claire Vernade. "Multivariate digital campaign content testing utilizing rank-1 best-arm identification." U.S. Patent Application 15/944,980, filed October 10, 2019.

Students and mentoring

As a Junior Researcher, I do not yet have the chance of officially supervising students. However, I did get the opportunity to advise some on various projects, including the MVA Masters program course on Graphs in Machine Learning taught by Prof. Michal Valko.

  • Yoan Russac (intern at Amazon Berlin in 2018 -- now, PhD student at ENS Paris)

  • Clémence Réda (Master project in 2019 -- now, PhD student at INSERM Paris)

  • Abel Adary, Louis Fournier (Master project in 2020)

  • Antoine Moulin (Master project in 2020)

  • Yoann Lemesle (Bachelor year-long project 2020-2021 -- student at ENS Rennes)

Collaborators and friends


Co-authors

Selected Talks


  • March 2020: Workshop on Optimisation and Machine Learning at CIRM (France)

  • November 26th 2019: Seminaire du departement d'informatique de l'ENS Rennes (in French)

  • March 2018: Invited talk at University of Washington (invited by Joseph Salmon and Zaid Harchaoui)

  • October 20th 2017: PhD Defense

  • June 2016: Workshop on Machine Learning for Online Advertising at ICML 2016

Community


I strongly support community groups, in particular towards better diversity in our extended field (Computer Science and Stats). I have volunteered and area chaired for the WiML workshop many times and I am co-leading with Ruth Urner the WiML-T effort for Women in Learning Theory .