Pascal van der Vaart

Delft University of Technology

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I’m a PhD student in machine learning at the Sequential Decision Making group at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. My research is on reinforcement learning, where agents learn by interacting with their environment to maximize long-term rewards. In this area I focus on uncertainty quantification and efficient exploration, mainly through Bayesian methods. Other research interests include Bayesian neural networks, generative models and Monte Carlo samplers.

Outside of research I enjoy hiking, tinkering with microelectronics, 3D printing and specialty coffee.

news

Jun 04, 2025 Reviewing five papers for Neurips 2025.
Feb 28, 2025 Presented my paper Epistemic Bellman Operators at AAAI’25 as an oral presentation!
Dec 11, 2024 My paper Epistemic Bellman Operators has been accepted at AAAI’25!
May 11, 2024 Presented my work “Bayesian Ensembles for Exploration in Deep Q-learning” as a poster at AAMAS’24 and oral presentation at ALA’24.

selected publications

  1. ebo.jpg
    Epistemic Bellman Operators
    Pascal R. Van der Vaart, Matthijs T.J. Spaan, and Neil Yorke-Smith
    In Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025