Jan-Willem van de Meent

Jan-Willem van de Meent is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he co-directs the AMLab with Max Welling. He holds an Assistant Professor position (on leave) at Northeastern University, continuing to advise students and collaborate remotely.

His research focuses on combining probabilistic programming and deep learning to develop models that generalize from limited data. Key areas include inductive biases through physical simulators, causal structures, and symmetries, with applications in robotics, NLP, healthcare, and physical sciences.

Recent work includes

• Variational Flow Matching for graph generation
• Equivariant neural models for physical systems
• Entropy coding of complex data structures
• Goal-contrastive reinforcement learning for robotics

Awards

• NSF CAREER award (2021)

Students & Postdocs

• Robin Walters (Postdoctoral Fellow)
• Ondrej Biza (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Babak Esmaeili (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Sam Stites (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Hao Wu (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Xiongyi Zhang (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Heiko Zimmermann (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Jered McInerney (Ph.D. Candidate)
• Eli Sennesh (Ph.D. Candidate)