Matt L. Sampson

prof_pic.jpg

Matt Sampson


Physics for AI


AI for Physics


PhD candidate at Princeton

Hey, I’m Matt, a PhD researcher at Princeton University working with Prof. Peter Melchior. I research ways to advance machine learning and science, particularly focusing on optimization, representation learning, and dynamical systems. Physics allows us to uncover order from chaos. My aim is to bring this approach to the field of machine learning optimization because no matter how complex and advanced our models become, they are only as useful as our ability to train them.

Previously I was at the Australian National University where I performed numerical experiments and helped develop code to simulate cosmic ray propagation through a dynamically evolving turbulent plasma.

Long-term vision: To design optimization methods that make it possible to build and train models with a deep understanding of complex dynamical systems — enabling new scientific discoveries and forming the foundations for increasingly general, physics-inspired intelligence.

news

May 13, 2025 Lucky to be one of 4 students from Princeton University nominated for the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship! The first nomination from the astrophysical sciences deptartment at Princeton

selected publications

  1. pathmin.png
    Path-minimizing latent ODEs for improved extrapolation and inference
    Matt L. Sampson and Peter Melchior
    Machine Learning: Science and Technology, Jun 2025
  2. cosmic.png
    Cosmic ray and plasma coupling for isothermal supersonic turbulence in the magnetized interstellar medium
    Matt L. Sampson, James R. Beattie, Romain Teyssier, and 5 more authors
    arXiv e-prints, Jun 2025
  3. score.png
    Score-matching neural networks for improved multi-band source separation
    Matt. L. Sampson, Peter. Melchior, Charlotte. Ward, and 1 more author
    Astronomy and Computing, Oct 2024
  4. hally.png
    Spotting Hallucinations in Inverse Problems with Data-Driven Priors
    Matt L. Sampson and Peter M. Melchior
    In ICML ML4Astrophysics Workshop (Oral), Jul 2023