Alexandru Meterez — ameterez [at] g [dot] harvard [dot] edu

Hey, I'm Alex, and I am a CS PhD student at Harvard in the Pehlevan Group co-advised by Prof. Cengiz Pehlevan and Prof. Sham Kakade. I am fortunate to be supported by a Kempner Fellowship in my research. My main interests are in Deep Learning theory and neural network optimization.

I aim to understand how these models learn from data by developing a theoretical framework backed by empirical evidence. My research philosophy is to balance theoretical rigor with providing strong intuitions for observed phenomena.

I finished my Data Science MSc at ETH Zurich working with Gunnar Rätsch and Francesco Orabona (KAUST) and my CS BSc at UPB working with Iuliu Vasilescu. I also interned in various places.

Recent news

Apr. 8, 2024  I will be attending ICLR 2024 in Vienna this year. Let me know if you want to meet!

Apr. 7, 2024  I am going to start my CS PhD in the Pehlevan Group at Harvard in Fall 2024!

Nov. 15, 2023  Starting my internship at MPI-IS with Antonio Orvieto!

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Preprints (*: equal contribution)

• [arXiv] The Optimization Landscape of SGD Across the Feature Learning Strength
  A. Atanasov*, A. Meterez*, J. Simon*, C. Pehlevan

Publications (*: equal contribution)

• [NeurIPS24] Why do Learning Rates Transfer? Reconciling Optimization and Scaling Limits for Deep Learning
  L. Noci*, A. Meterez*. T. Hofmann, A. Orvieto
• [ICLR24] Towards Training Without Depth Limits: Batch Normalization Without Gradient Explosion
  A. Meterez*, A. Joudaki*, F. Orabona, A. Immer, G. Rätsch, H. Daneshmand
• [RECOMB23] Aligning distant sequences to graphs using long seed sketches
  A. Joudaki*, A. Meterez*, H.Mustafa. R. Groot Koerkamp, A. Kahles, G. Rätsch

Misc.

I was born in Romania. I used to do a lot of systems programming back in my BSc years. I am also an advocate of open-source software. Some of my hobbies are running, reading, swimming, and since I mostly commute by bike, bike fixing.

parts of this website are borrowed from this work