Susan Wei is an Associate Professor in the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University. She previously held an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, 2020–2023) and was a visiting faculty researcher at Google DeepMind in Sydney (2023).
Her research is in probabilistic machine learning, with a current focus on Bayesian predictive inference. She works on the martingale posterior and related predictive constructions of uncertainty, including limit theory for learned predictive rules such as transformers and prior-data fitted networks. She applies these tools to the probabilistic interpretability of meta-learned sequence models, treating a trained sequence model as an implicit predictive rule and recovering the prior and posterior it encodes. She has also worked on Bayesian deep learning, variational inference, and singular learning theory.
She is a 2026 recipient of a UK AI Security Institute Alignment Project grant for the project Probabilistic Interpretability of Transformers, and has received unrestricted research gifts from Google (2022, 2026), the most recent of which also supports this line of work.
PhD in Statistics, 2014
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
BA in Mathematics, 2009
University of California, Berkeley
Earlier arXiv versions used different titles; v3 matches the TMLR camera-ready version. Received a Best Paper Award at the ICML 2024 Workshop on High-dimensional Learning Dynamics (HiLD): The Emergence of Structure and Reasoning.
There are two arXiv versions with different titles, but the material is very similar; v2 matches the ICML camera-ready version.
arXiv v1 appeared under a different title and author list, with a stronger emphasis on mathematical development. arXiv v2 matches the AISTATS camera-ready paper and integrates material from arXiv:2402.03698.
For a complete list, see my CV.
I have developed and taught an introduction to deep learning across several rounds of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) national schools, which are open to graduate students, early career researchers, and industry members across Australia:
My lecture slides for the introductory deep learning material are available here, covering:
The companion module on deep generative modeling was given by Robert Salomone, whose materials are here.
Selected units I have taught (see the linked handbook entries for details):
Monash University
University of Melbourne