Florian Schäfer

S1317 CODA

756 W Peachtree St

Atlanta, GA 30332

I’m Florian Schäfer, assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, I received my PhD in applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, working with Houman Owhadi. Before that, I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics at the University of Bonn.

My research interests lie at the interface of numerical computation, statistical inference, and competitive games. To learn more, have a look at these high-level summaries or the defense of my thesis.

I am currently hiring PhD students. If you have a strong background in computational mathematics and the above seems interesting (or you have a project in mind that I might find interesting), feel free to reach out!

news

Oct 22, 2021 New paper, joint with Houman, now on the arXiv! We show that the solution operator of elliptic PDEs can be recovered, or learned, from only a polylogarithmic number of matrix-vector products!
Sep 21, 2021 I will be giving a talk at the Emory Scientific Computing Seminar on September 24th at 12:30 pm!
Aug 25, 2021 Check out Matthias’ paper on Bayesian transport maps, fresh on the arXiv!
Jun 10, 2021 In joint work with Jiong Chen, Jin Huang, and Mathieu Desbrun accepted in SIGGRAPH2021, we show how to beat state-of-the-art AMG libraries just by incomplete Cholesky factorization!
Jun 7, 2021 Check out Jing’s paper on robust RL, presented as a poster at L4DC2021!

selected publications

  1. Sparse Cholesky factorization by Kullback-Leibler minimization
    Schäfer, Florian, Katzfuss, Matthias, and Owhadi, Houman
    SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 2021
    arXiv
  2. Compression, inversion, and approximate PCA of dense kernel matrices at near-linear computational complexity
    Schäfer, Florian, Sullivan, T. J., and Owhadi, Houman
    Multiscale Model. Simul. 2021
    arXiv Blog
  3. Implicit competitive regularization in GANs
    Schäfer, Florian, Zheng, Hongkai, and Anandkumar, Anima
    In the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020)
    arXiv Blog Slides
  4. Competitive Gradient Descent
    Schäfer, Florian, and Anandkumar, Anima
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32
    arXiv HTML Blog Poster Slides