About

My name is Z. Sun, and I have obtained my PhD at UCL. I was based in FSML group of UCL, and was lucky to be supervised by Prof. F-X Briol and Prof. J-H Xue. My research was mainly funded by EPSRC and UCL jointly; and partially by The Alan Turing Institute. In general, I am very interested in computational statistics and machine learning. I have been working on Monte Carlo methods, meta-learning, Stein’s method, kernel methods and Gaussian processes.

Activities

  • Co-Organiser: S-DCE Reading Group in The Alan Turing Institute (2021 - 2022)
  • PC Memember/Reviewer: AISTATS, ICLR, NeurIPS, UAI

Publication

  • Sun, Z., Oates, C. J. & Briol, F-X. (2023). Meta-learning Control Variates: Variance Reduction with Limited Data. In Proceedings of the 39th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2023). (Conference) (Preprint)
    • This paper was accepted for an oral presentation at UAI, top 3%.
  • Li, K.*, Sun, Z.* (2023). Multilevel Control Functional. ICML 2023 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling. (Preprint)
    • This paper was also accepted at ICML 2023 Workshop on Computational Biology.
  • Sun, Z., Barp, A., Briol, F.-X.(2023). Vector-valued Control Variates. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023). (Conference)(Preprint)
    • This paper was awarded a Best Student Paper Award from SBSS of the American Statistical Association in 2022.
  • Sun, Z., Wu, J., Li, X., Yang, W., Xue, J-H.(2021). Amortized Bayesian Prototype Meta-learning: A new probabilistic meta-learning approach to few-shot image classification. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2021).(Conference)
  • Li, X.*, Sun, Z.*, Xue, J-H., Ma, Z. (2021). A Concise Review of Recent Few-shot Meta-learning Methods. Neurocomputing.
  • Li, X.*, Wu, J.*, Sun, Z.*, Ma, Z., Cao, J., Xue, J-H.(2020). Bi-Similarity Network for Fine-grained Few-shot Image Classification. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Talk/Presentation

  • Talk at UAI, 2023, USA.
  • Poster at ICML, 2023, USA.
  • Talk at SIAM UKIE National Student Chapter Conference, 2023, UK.
  • Poster at the 7th London Symposium of Information Theory (LSIT), 2023, UK.
  • Talk at topic-contributed sessions of Joint Statistical Meetings, 2022, USA.
  • Talk at SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification, 2022, USA.
  • Poster at the AI UK, 2022, UK.
  • Talk at International Conference on Monte Carlo Methods and Applications (Special Session on Stein’s method), 2021, German.
  • Poster at AISTATS, 2021, USA.
  • Talk at Data-Centric Engineering Seminars @ The Alan Turing Institue, 2021, UK.