Melanie Sclar

I am a CS PhD student at the University of Washington, advised by Yejin Choi and Yulia Tsvetkov. I am also a visiting researcher at Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Labs @ Meta, working with Asli Celikyilmaz. My primary research topic is reasoning, with a dual focus: developing algorithms for improving language models’ reasoning skills, and understanding the limitations of current models in reasoning tasks. I am particularly interested in theory of mind reasoning, where I did research for story comprehension setups and multi-agent reinforcement learning setups; and in accurately characterizing and quantifying models’ skills.

See my Google Scholar for an updated list of publications. Published works include Faith and Fate (NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight) and SymbolicToM (ACL 2023 Outstanding Paper Award).

See full-sized image here.

Before the PhD program

I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires, with a heavy focus in Mathematics. I did my Master’s thesis in visual search modeling (oral presentation at SVRHM @ NeurIPS 2020, second-highest scoring paper and recipient of the NVIDIA Diversity in AI Best Paper Award).

I was a Lead Machine Learning Engineer at ASAPP, where I developed models to efficiently rank text in real-time. Before that, I was a Lead Data Scientist at BrightSector, developing different NLP models for the largest e-commerce site in Latin America. I did two Software Engineer internships at Facebook, where I was granted two patents for my work in video stabilization (see 1, 2).

I won several international awards in mathematics and informatics olympiads. Among them:

• Latin American Champion and First to Solve Problem F award at the World Finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (see press coverage in the front page of the largest newspaper in Argentina)
• Bronze Medal at the Ibero-American Olympiad in Mathematics (I got to meet the president because of this!)
• Silver Medal at the South American Olympiad in Mathematics
• National Champion at the Argentinian Mathematical Olympiad
• National Champion at the Argentinian Programming Tournament

I also won some awards in machine learning competitions at a national level:

• first prize at the 2017 University of Buenos Aires’ School of Informatics challenge (+150 teams competing)
• second prize in the 2018 University of Buenos Aires’ School of Informatics challenge

I am very grateful for the scholarships I received throughout my studies:

• Scholarship - Award City of Buenos Aires, awarded by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires to the top 25 students in the city
• Bicentennial Scholarship, received from the National Argentinian Government

Besides Math and CS, I love languages and teaching. I speak Spanish, English, French and Portuguese, and was a teaching assistant at the University of Buenos Aires for over 3 years. I’ve also been a coach for mathematics olympiads, both in schools and as a private tutor.