Xuchan (Jenny) Bao

jennybao at cs dot toronto dot edu

I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute. I am fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Roger Grosse. My research interests lie broadly in neural network training dynamics, AI safety, control theory and optimization.

I obtained my B.A.Sc in Engineering Science (robotics option) at the University of Toronto. During my undergraduate years, I interned at Dessa and was a summer research student at Prof. Angela Schoellig's lab. I was also part of The University Of Toronto Self-Driving Car Team.

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Research
Statistics estimation in neural network training: a recursive identification approach
Ruth Crasto, Xuchan Bao Roger Grosse
ICML 2023 Workshop on New Frontiers in Learning, Control, and Dynamical Systems

Hessian Inertia in Neural Networks
Xuchan Bao, Alberto Bietti, Aaron Defazio, Vivien Cabannes
ICML 2023 Workshop on High-dimensional Learning Dynamics

Finding and Only Finding Differential Nash Equilibria by Both Pretending to be a Follower
Xuchan Bao, Guodong Zhang
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2023
Featured certification (awarded to papers that are very high quality, approximately equal to oral/spotlight in top-tier conferences)

Learning to Elect
Cem Anil*, Xuchan Bao*
NeurIPS, 2021

A unified analysis of first-order methods for smooth games via integral quadratic constraints
Guodong Zhang, Xuchan Bao, Laurent Lessard, Roger Grosse
JMLR, 2021
Regularized linear autoencoders recover the principal components, eventually
Xuchan Bao, James Lucas, Sushant Sachdeva, Roger Grosse
NeurIPS, 2020
poster / code

Benchmarking model-based reinforcement learning
Tingwu Wang, Xuchan Bao, Clavera Ignasi, Jerrick Hoang, Yeming Wen, Eric Langlois, Shunshi Zhang, Guodong Zhang, Pieter Abbeel, Jimmy Ba
arXiv pre-print
code

Timbretron: A wavenet (cyclegan (cqt (audio))) pipeline for musical timbre transfer
Sicong Huang, Qiyang Li, Cem Anil, Xuchan Bao, Sageev Oore, Roger B Grosse
ICLR, 2019
project page

Deep neural networks for improved, impromptu trajectory tracking of quadrotors
Qiyang Li, Jingxing Qian, Zining Zhu, Xuchan Bao, Mohamed K Helwa, Angela P Schoellig
ICRA, 2017
proceeding

Teaching

I was a teaching assistant for the following courses:

CSC2541: Topics in Machine Learning: Neural Net Training Dynamics. Winter 2022.

CSC413/421/2516: Neural Networks. Winter 2021 / Winter 2020 / Winter 2019.

CSC311/2515: Introduction to Machine Learning. Fall 2021 / Fall 2020 / Fall 2019.

CSC180: Introduction to Programming. Fall 2016.

Website design and source code from Jon Barron.