Florian Schäfer

prof_pic.jpg

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

May 25, 2023 I gave a talk at Ecole Polytechnique, thanks Mathieu Desbrun for hosting me!
Apr 26, 2023 Paper on variational inference with double KL minimization accepted at ICML 2023! First authors are Jian Cao and Myeongjong Kang from the group of Matthias Katzfuss.
Apr 13, 2023 Congratulations to Stephen Huan for receiving a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) from Caltech!
Congratulations to Qi Zeng for receiving the 2023 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech!
Apr 7, 2023 New paper with Yifan (lead author) and Houman now on the arXiv. We use KL-minimizing Cholesky factorization to accelerate GP-based PDE solvers, resulting in scalable GP-based solvers for general PDEs!
Mar 26, 2023 Matthias’ paper on Bayesian transport maps, was just accepted at JASA T&M!

selected publications

  1. Sparse Cholesky factorization by Kullback-Leibler minimization
    Florian Schäfer, Matthias Katzfuss, and Houman Owhadi
    SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
    arXiv
  2. Compression, inversion, and approximate PCA of dense kernel matrices at near-linear computational complexity
    Florian Schäfer, T. J. Sullivan, and Houman Owhadi
    Multiscale Model. Simul.
    arXiv Blog
  3. Implicit competitive regularization in GANs
    Florian Schäfer, Hongkai Zheng, and Anima Anandkumar
    In the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020)
    arXiv Blog Slides
  4. Competitive Gradient Descent
    Florian Schäfer, and Anima Anandkumar
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32
    arXiv HTML Blog
  5. Sparse recovery of elliptic solvers from matrix-vector products
    Florian Schäfer, and Houman Owhadi
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05351
    arXiv