Victor-Alexandru Darvariu
@vadarvariu.bsky.social
postdoc @ oxford robotics institute. interested in reinforcement learning, graphs, robots, and combinatorial optimization.
https://victor.darvariu.me
https://victor.darvariu.me
While exploring this lovely city I bumped into a mobile sculpture by Alexander Calder. I'm not sure whether it's the one on the cover of the classic CLRS Introduction to Algorithms textbook, but it must be a closely related cousin at least!
August 18, 2025 at 6:46 PM
While exploring this lovely city I bumped into a mobile sculpture by Alexander Calder. I'm not sure whether it's the one on the cover of the classic CLRS Introduction to Algorithms textbook, but it must be a closely related cousin at least!
My colleague Alex Schutz (alex-schutz.github.io) will be presenting the paper "A Finite-State Controller Based Offline Solver for Deterministic POMDPs" (arxiv.org/abs/2505.00596) on Friday 22nd at 11:30 in the Planning and Scheduling session, please consider joining us.
August 18, 2025 at 6:46 PM
My colleague Alex Schutz (alex-schutz.github.io) will be presenting the paper "A Finite-State Controller Based Offline Solver for Deterministic POMDPs" (arxiv.org/abs/2505.00596) on Friday 22nd at 11:30 in the Planning and Scheduling session, please consider joining us.
Dan is truly an amazing person and I hope he will do well in office. The problems ahead are very thorny, and the threat of the far-right will linger on, but it's worth taking a moment to celebrate his victory.
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Dan is truly an amazing person and I hope he will do well in office. The problems ahead are very thorny, and the threat of the far-right will linger on, but it's worth taking a moment to celebrate his victory.
Not even the Romanian diaspora in Western Europe, who counterintuitively voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Eurosceptic candidate (?!), could turn the tide.
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Not even the Romanian diaspora in Western Europe, who counterintuitively voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Eurosceptic candidate (?!), could turn the tide.
The country rallied around Dan in a campaign that involved many Romanians sitting down with their relatives and friends, explaining the threats of far-right politics.
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
The country rallied around Dan in a campaign that involved many Romanians sitting down with their relatives and friends, explaining the threats of far-right politics.
It was a truly strange two weeks in between voting rounds, in which Dan's opponent could not have sabotaged his leading position more if he tried (ghosting debates, ad-hominem attacks, ...).
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
It was a truly strange two weeks in between voting rounds, in which Dan's opponent could not have sabotaged his leading position more if he tried (ghosting debates, ad-hominem attacks, ...).
He managed an incredible victory against his Eurosceptic, ultranationalist adversary, who earned 41% of the vote in the first round against Dan's 21%.
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
He managed an incredible victory against his Eurosceptic, ultranationalist adversary, who earned 41% of the vote in the first round against Dan's 21%.
Dan went on to study at École Normale Supérieure and then did a PhD at Paris 13, returning to Romania afterwards as a mathematician, and eventually got into politics.
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Dan went on to study at École Normale Supérieure and then did a PhD at Paris 13, returning to Romania afterwards as a mathematician, and eventually got into politics.
I'd heard he did olympiads in his youth but I was blown away by his accomplishments! Other 1988 gold medallists whose names you might recognise are Ngô Bào Châu and Terence Tao, both of whom went on to earn Fields medals.
May 21, 2025 at 5:42 PM
I'd heard he did olympiads in his youth but I was blown away by his accomplishments! Other 1988 gold medallists whose names you might recognise are Ngô Bào Châu and Terence Tao, both of whom went on to earn Fields medals.
You can read the full paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10..... We also open source our code and data at github.com/VictorDarvar.... 8/
Tree search in DAG space with model-based reinforcement learning for causal discovery | Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Identifying causal structure is central to many fields ranging from strategic decision
making to biology and economics. In this work, we propose Causal Discovery Upper Confidence
Bound for Trees (CD-U...
royalsocietypublishing.org
April 28, 2025 at 11:14 AM
You can read the full paper here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10..... We also open source our code and data at github.com/VictorDarvar.... 8/
The method is broadly applicable to any DAG construction task. If you work on causal inference, reinforcement learning, or combinatorial optimization, we believe CD-UCT offers a promising new direction. 7/
April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
The method is broadly applicable to any DAG construction task. If you work on causal inference, reinforcement learning, or combinatorial optimization, we believe CD-UCT offers a promising new direction. 7/
We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Across the board, CD-UCT consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art model-free RL approach and greedy search baselines. 6/
April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Across the board, CD-UCT consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art model-free RL approach and greedy search baselines. 6/
Our method applies broadly to causal Bayesian networks, handling both discrete and continuous random variables, which makes it suitable for a wide range of domains. 5/
April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Our method applies broadly to causal Bayesian networks, handling both discrete and continuous random variables, which makes it suitable for a wide range of domains. 5/
A key contribution is an efficient, formally proven algorithm for excluding edges that would introduce cycles, enabling deeper and more effective discrete search during DAG construction. 4/
April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
A key contribution is an efficient, formally proven algorithm for excluding edges that would introduce cycles, enabling deeper and more effective discrete search during DAG construction. 4/
CD-UCT incrementally builds directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) through a targeted tree search, improving substantially over more standard model-free approaches such as RL-BIC. 3/
April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
CD-UCT incrementally builds directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) through a targeted tree search, improving substantially over more standard model-free approaches such as RL-BIC. 3/
Identifying causal structure is fundamental to many fields including strategic decision-making, biology, and economics. In this paper, we introduce CD-UCT, a model-based reinforcement learning method for causal discovery. 2/
April 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Identifying causal structure is fundamental to many fields including strategic decision-making, biology, and economics. In this paper, we introduce CD-UCT, a model-based reinforcement learning method for causal discovery. 2/
Here's to a fresh start!
April 25, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Here's to a fresh start!
I've used www.sky-follower-bridge.dev and github.com/marcomaroni-..., both tools are pretty stable!
April 25, 2025 at 5:44 PM
I've used www.sky-follower-bridge.dev and github.com/marcomaroni-..., both tools are pretty stable!
Thread with an overview of the paper:
New pre-print now on arXiv, Graph Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization: A Survey and Unifying Perspective (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06492). Joint work with Steve Hailes and @mircomusolesi. 🧵 1/10
April 25, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Thread with an overview of the paper: