Christian Schroeder de Witt

I am a leading researcher in foundational AI and information security. My recent works include a breakthrough result on the 25+ year old problem of perfectly secure steganography (jointly with Sam Sokota), which was featured by Scientific American , Quanta Magazine, and Bruce Schneier’s Security Blog, as well as illusory attacks, a novel form of adversarial attack on reinforcement learning agents (Spotlight at ICLR 2024). During my Ph.D., I helped establish the field of cooperative deep multi-agent reinforcement learning, resulting in popular learning algorithms such as QMIX, MACKRL, IPPO, and FACMAC, and the standard benchmark environments SMAC and Multi-Agent MuJoCo.

I am currently a postdoc with Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford, and a former visiting researcher with Turing Award-winner Prof. Yoshua Bengio at MILA (Quebec) and postdoc with FLAIR. Previously, I completed my DPhil (Ph.D.) “Coordination and Communication in Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” with Prof. Philip Torr (Torr Vision Group) and Prof. Shimon Whiteson (WhiRL), which won an EPSRC IAA Doctoral Impact Fund Award and is, according to my examiner Prof. Frans Oliehoek, a “standard reference in the field”.

I hold distinguished masters degrees in Physics, as well as Computer Science (both University of Oxford), during the latter of which I proved an open incompleteness theorem in categorical quantum mechanics (the completed ZX-calculus is now a mainstream tool in quantum computing).

In 2022, I was selected as a “30 under 35 rising strategist (Europe)” by Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum and the European Council on Foreign Relations. I also received a Best Idea award from the CCAI community in 2019 for work on solar geoengineering and deep multi-agent learning.

Supervision

Please contact me if you are interested in working with me. I supervise undergraduate projects, master’s theses, and co-supervise Ph.D. projects in a wide range of topics in both deep multi-agent learning, and information security.

Some of my students and mentees include:

• Linas Nasvytis (MSc Statistics student, now Research Fellow at Harvard University (Psychology and ML))
• Yat Long Lo (MSc Computer Science student - winner of Tony Hoare Prize for best MSc Thesis in Computer Science, now Dyson Robot Learning Lab)
• Khaulat Abdulhakeem (mentee, now MS Education Data Science at Stanford University)
• Eshaan Agrawal (mentee and collaborator, now ORISE Fellow at the Department of Energy)