Welcome to the OpAL Lab
The Optimization, Analytics, and Learning (OpAL) Lab is a research group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. We work on machine learning for graphs and neural algorithmic reasoning. The former involves making predictions using multimodal datasets that combine features and relational information among entities. The latter focuses on using neural networks to solve problems that require algorithmic solutions. The two subjects often overlap.
We are located at the University of Waterloo, a vibrant technological hub with Concept, Velocity and Google around the block. We are also part of the Scientific Computation Group and the Waterloo Data and Artificial Intelligence Institute.
We are grateful for funding from the University of Waterloo and NSERC.
News
28 February 2025Artur Back de Luca will join Amazon NY as an intern in May/June 2025.
24 February 2025New paper: Exact Learning of Permutations for Nonzero Binary Inputs with Logarithmic Training Size and Quadratic Ensemble Complexity. You can read a brief announcement of it here.
4 February 2025New paper: Positional Attention: Expressivity and Learnability of Algorithmic Computation. You can read a brief announcement of it here.
10 January 2025Shenghao Yang successfully defended his thesis with title 'Perspectives of Graph Diffusion: Computation, Local Partitioning, Statistical Recovery, and Applications'. You can read a brief announcement of it here.
3 December 2024New paper: LVLM-COUNT: Enhancing the Counting Ability of Large Vision-Language Models. You can read a brief announcement of it here.