Brett Daley

Machine Learning Research Scientist

About Me

Brett Daley - Machine Learning Research Scientist

I’m a research scientist at Meta. I work on reinforcement learning and large language models.

I received my PhD in Computing Science from the University of Alberta (⁠⁠), advised by Marlos C. Machado and Martha White. My award-winning thesis was titled “Multistep Credit Assignment in Deep Reinforcement Learning”. I interned at Meta and Sony AI during my PhD.

Previously, I earned my MS in Computer Science and BS in Electrical/Computer Engineering from Northeastern University (⁠⁠), and my MMS in Global Affairs from Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University (⁠⁠). I interned at Tesla and SpaceX in 2016-2017, which ignited my initial career interest in AI.

Awards

PhD Outstanding Thesis Award in Computing Science, University of Alberta (2025)
Outstanding Paper Award on the Theory of Reinforcement Learning, RLC (2025)
Best Reviewer Award, ICML (2024)
Best Paper Award Finalist, AAMAS (2021)
Schwarzman Scholarship, Tsinghua University (2018)

Research Interests

My research has focused on the temporal credit-assignment problem and efficient reward-based learning. I am particularly interested in addressing high-dimensional environments where classical methods become infeasible. To this end, my algorithms have often utilized deep neural networks to process rich sensory data, which present a variety of challenges to long-term credit assignment.

See my Google Scholar profile for a list of my publications.