| CARVIEW |
Geoff Pleiss

CIFAR AI Chair, Vector Institute
geoff.pleiss <at> stat.ubc.ca
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, where I am an inaugural member of CAIDA's AIM-SI (AI Methods for Scientific Impact) cluster. I am also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, where I am an inaugural member of CAIDA's AIM-SI (AI Methods for Scientific Impact) cluster. I am also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.
My research interests intersect deep learning and probablistic modeling. More specifically, I'm interested in heuristic and approximate notions of uncertainty from machine learning models, and how they can inform reliable and optimal downstream decisions within the contexts of experimental design and scientific discovery. Major focuses of my work include:
- neural network uncertainty quantification,
- Bayesian optimization,
- Gaussian processes, and
- ensemble methods.
I am also an active open source contributior. Most notably, I co-created and maintain the GPyTorch Gaussian process library with Jake Gardner.
Previously, I was a postdoc at Columbia University with John P. Cunningham. I received my Ph.D. from the CS department at Cornell University in 2020 where I was advised by Kilian Weinberger and also worked closely with Andrew Gordon Wilson.
Current Students and Interns

Donney Fan
PhD StudentUBC Computer Science(co-sup. by Mark Schmidt)
Tim G. Zhou
MSc StudentUBC Computer Science(co-sup. by Evan Shelhamer)Zachary Lau
MSc StudentUBC Statistics
Isaac Rankin
PhD StudentUBC StatisticsLogan Yates
PhD StudentUBC Statistics
Interested in joining my lab? See the page on joining my lab for information on how to apply/contact me.
Recent and Selected Publications
For a full list of publications, please see my CV or my Google Scholar page.
NEWWe Still Don't Understand High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization
- Colin Doumont
- Donney Fan
- Natalie Maus
- Jacob R. Gardner
- Henry Moss
- Geoff Pleiss
— Under SubmissionNEWAsymmetric Duos: Sidekicks Improve Uncertainty[Spotlight presentation]
- Tim G. Zhou
- Evan Shelhamer
- Geoff Pleiss
— In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025Theoretical Limitations of Ensembles in the Age of Overparameterization[Oral presentation]
- Niclas Dern
- John P. Cunningham
- Geoff Pleiss
— In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025Approximation-Aware Bayesian Optimization[Spotlight presentation]
- Natalie Maus
- Kyurae Kim
- Geoff Pleiss
- David Eriksson
- John P. Cunningham
- Jacob R. Gardner
— In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024Deep Ensembles Work, But Are They Necessary?
- Taiga Abe*
- E. Kelly Buchanan*
- Geoff Pleiss
- Richard Zemel
- John P. Cunningham
— In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022GPyTorch: Blackbox Matrix-Matrix Gaussian Process Inference with GPU Acceleration.[Spotlight presentation]
- Jacob R. Gardner*
- Geoff Pleiss*
- David Bindel
- Kilian Q. Weinberger
- Andrew Gordon Wilson
— In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018On Fairness and Calibration
- Geoff Pleiss*
- Manish Raghavan*
- Felix Wu
- Jon Kleinberg
- Kilian Q. Weinberger
— In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2017On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks
- Chuan Guo*
- Geoff Pleiss*
- Yu Sun*
- Kilian Q. Weinberger
— In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2017
Recent and Selected Talks
Oct. 2024Ensembles in the Age of Overparameterization: Promises and Pathologies
Recent empirical and theoretical work characterizing ensembles of neural networks.Dec. 2023Troubling Trajectories for Uncertainty Quantification and Decision Making with Neural Networks
A discussion of uncertainty quantification and my recent work on neural network ensembles.Spring 2022Bridging The Gap Between Deep Learning and Probabilistic Modeling
A talk connecting my Gaussian process and neural network research.
Selected Open Source
For a full list of respositories I actively contribute to, please see my Github page.
CoLA (Compositional Linear Algebra)Beta Release
A library for structured linear algebra operations in JaX and PyTorch.Coauthors: Andres Potapczynski, Marc Anton FinziLinearOperatorv0.6 Release
A library for structured linear algebra operations in PyTorch.Coauthors: Max Balandat