Dr Tom Rainforth

Senior Researcher in Statistical Machine Learning

Biographical sketch

I am currently a Senior Researcher in Statistical Machine Learning and Leader of the RainML (rainml.uk) Research Lab.  Prior to this, I was a Junior Research Fellow in Computer Science at Christ Church College, and before that I was a postdoc working with Yee Whye Teh.  I originally studied Mechanical Engineering (MEng) at the University of Cambridge, while I did my DPhil 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 periods of study.

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

Rainforth, T. (2018) “Nesting probabilistic programs”, in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.
Le, T., Igl, M., Rainforth, T., Jin, T. and Wood, F. (2018) “Auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo”, in Sixth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vancouver Canada, 30th April - 3rd May, 2018. OpenReview.
Rainforth, T., Kosiorek, A., Le, T., Maddison, C., Igl, M., Wood, F. and Teh, Y. (2018) “Tighter variational bounds are not necessarily better”, in 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2018.
Le, T., Igl, M., Rainforth, T., Jin, T. and Wood, F. (2018) “Auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo”, in 6th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2018 - Conference Track Proceedings.
Rainforth, T., Le, T., van de Meent, J.-W., Osborne, M. and Wood, F. (2016) “Bayesian Optimization for Probabilistic Programs”, in NIPS 2016: 29th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation.
Doucet, A., Rainforth, T., Naesseth, C., Lindsten, F., Paige, B., Wood, F. and van de Meent, J.-W. (2016) “Interacting particle Markov chain Monte Carlo”, in ICML 2016: 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning. Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Foster, A., Jankowiak, M., Bingham, E., Horsfall, P., Teh, Y., Rainforth, T. and Goodman, N. (no date) “Variational Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design.”

Contact Details

Email: rainforth@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office: 1.06

Pronouns: He/Him

Graduate Students

Alex Forster
Angus Phillips
Freddie Bickford Smith

Guneet Singh Dhillon
Andrew Campbell
Desi Ivanova
Jannik Kossen
Ning Miao
Tim Reichelt
Mrinank Sharma
Yuyang Shi
Shahine Bouabid
Jin Xu