Adrian de Wynter

I am a principal applied scientist at Microsoft and a researcher (PGR) at the University of York. I work in projects related to natural language understanding/generation and fundamental problems in deep learning, such as reasoning and formal modelling of dialogue, like LLMs.

My primary interest is computation, and specifically, the study of reasoning as it relates to humans and machines. My approach is mainly intuitionistic in nature, contrasting with some other formalisms used in this field. In English: algorithms have provable guarantees of complexity and convergence via construction, and this proof must be closely-related to a computable (e.g., realistic, decidable, production) scenario. This gives meaningful answers about complex problems, while also circumventing mathematical results that are rarely seen in practice. For example, we recently used category theory to prove that some prompting strategies are objectively better than others; and that they would produce more preferrable outcomes by users.

I'm a strong proponent of training small and efficient models, as opposed to overspecified networks--which I call Jurassic networks. This matters! The power required to train these models translates into tons of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, and it's devastating to the environment. Although I showed that finding a globally optimal solution to this problem is generally undecidable, I have also proved that it is possible to find approximation algorithms that give near-optimal solutions in polynomial time--going as far as applying these results to BERT and reaching a (then) state-of-the-art on model compression. This last contribution was later adapted for quantum circuit optimization in a rather fantastic work by folks at ORNL.

Other of my research interests are related to recreational mathematics (especially about games), preserving endangered languages, and applications of LLMs to create inclusive environments to traditionally excluded groups in ML (e.g., neurodiverse individuals such as myself, non-English speakers, etcetera).

Last updated: Aug '24.