Professor Tom Rainforth

Associate Professor of Statistical Machine Learning

Biographical sketch

I am an Associate Professor of Statistical Machine Learning, leader of the RainML Research Lab (rainml.uk), Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Data-Driven Algorithms for Data Acquisition (Mar 2024 - Feb 2029, funded by the UKRI Horizon Guarantee Scheme). Though I only started my current Associate Professor role in September 2024, I have been a member of the Department since 2017, first as a postdoc working with Yee Whye Teh (Sep 2017 - Aug 2019), then as an associate member as part of a Junior Research Fellow in Computer Science at Christ Church College (Sep 2019 - Dec 2019), then as a Florence Nightingale Bicentennial Fellow and Tutor in Statistics and Probability (Jan 2020 - Feb 2024), and finally a Senior Research Fellow supported by my own ERC grant (Mar 2024 - Aug 2024). I originally studied Mechanical Engineering (MEng) at the University of Cambridge, while I did my D.Phil in Oxford under the supervision of Frank Wood and Michael Osborne, focusing mostly on probabilistic programming and Monte Carlo methods. I also had a stint working in the Ferrari Formula 1 team in between the two.

Personal website: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~twgr/

Research Interests

My research covers a wide range of topics in and around statistical machine learning and experimental design, with areas of particular interest including:

Bayesian experimental design
Probabilistic and data-efficient approaches to machine learning
Active learning
Deep learning, with a particular focus on probabilistic approaches, deep representation learning, and deep generative models
Probabilistic programming
Approximate inference and Monte Carlo methods

Please see my Google Scholar page for an up-to-date list of publications.

Publications

Emde, C. et al. (2025) “Shh, don’t say that! Domain certification in LLMs”, in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025). OpenReview.

Bickford Smith, F., Foster, A. and Rainforth, T. (2024) “Making better use of unlabelled data in Bayesian Active learning”, in Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. Journal of Machine Learning Research, pp. 847–855.

Reichelt, T., Ong, L. and Rainforth, T. (2024) “Beyond Bayesian model averaging over paths in probabilistic programs with stochastic support”, in Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. Journal of Machine Learning Research, pp. 829–837.

Rainforth, T. et al. (2024) “Modern Bayesian experimental design”, Statistical Science, 39(1), pp. 100–114.

Miao, N., Teh, Y. and Rainforth, T. (2024) “SelfCheck: using LLMs to zero-shot check their own step-by-step reasoning”, in The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2024. International Conference on Learning Representations.

Kossen, J., Gal, Y. and Rainforth, T. (2024) “In-context learning learns label relationships but is not conventional learning”, in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024). OpenReview.

Sharma, M. et al. (2024) “Incorporating Unlabelled Data into Bayesian Neural Networks”, Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2024.

Dhillon, G., Deligiannidis, G. and Rainforth, T. (2024) “On the Expected Size of Conformal Prediction Sets”, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, pp. 1549–1557.

Campbell, A. et al. (2024) “Generative Flows on Discrete State-Spaces: Enabling Multimodal Flows with Applications to Protein Co-Design”, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, pp. 5453–5512.

Lu, X., Rainforth, T. and Teh, Y. (2023) “Daisee: Adaptive importance sampling by balancing exploration and exploitation”, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 50(3), pp. 1298–1324.

Contact Details

Email: rainforth@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office: 1.21

Pronouns: He/Him

Research Groups

Computational Statistics and Machine Learning

Graduate Students

Alex Forster
Angus Phillips
Freddie Bickford Smith
Guneet Singh Dhillon
Andrew Campbell
Desi Ivanova
Jannik Kossen
Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi

Ning Miao

Marcel Hedman
Tim Reichelt
Mrinank Sharma
Yuyang Shi
Shahine Bouabid
Jin Xu