Michal Valko
Founding Researcher at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay
Greater Paris Metropolitan Region France
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichal Valko is a founding researcher and tenured scientist who builds algorithms to minimize human supervision, spanning deep RL, bandits, self-supervised learning and scalable alignment for large language models. With a PhD from Pittsburgh and an HdR in bandit theory, he co-created DeepMind Paris, led BYOL and world-model work at DeepMind, and served as principal Llama scientist at Meta on Llama 3 post-training and online RL stacks. His research blends theoretical guarantees with practical systems—examples include novel Monte-Carlo tree search methods, online kernel and graph sparsification results, and scalable fine-tuning techniques for LMMs. He teaches advanced graph-based ML at ENS Paris-Saclay and now applies decades of sequential and representation-learning expertise to steer a stealth AI startup out of London. An uncommon thread in his career is repeatedly closing the loop between provable algorithms and large-scale production ML, from hospital anomaly detection to state-of-the-art model alignment.
8 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HdR), Bandit theory, Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HdR), Bandit theory at ENS Paris-SaclayMSc., Computer Science, MSc., Computer Science at Univerzita Komenského v BratislaveErasmus Exchange, Machine Learning, Erasmus Exchange, Machine Learning at Universidade Nova de LisboaGymnasium Diploma, Mathematics, Gymnasium Diploma, Mathematics at Alejová High SchoolPhD., Machine Learning, PhD., Machine Learning at University of PittsburghVisiting Student (Cross-registered from University of Pittsburgh), Machine Learning, Computer Science, Visiting Student (Cross-registered from University of Pittsburgh), Machine Learning, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
English, French, Slovak, Czech, PortugueseProgramming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
misovalko/misovalko.github.io
Feb 2021 - May 2025
Contributions:210 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 3 months
guilgautier/DPPy_paper
Aug 2018 - Oct 2019
Companion paper for DPPy
Contributions:9 commits, 4 pushes in 1 year 1 month
companiondppy
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