Michal Valko

Michal Valko
Valko in 2025
Alma mater	Comenius University University of Pittsburgh
Known for	Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) Implicit exploration (IX) for multi-armed bandit algorithms Nash Learning from Human Feedback (NLHF)
Scientific career
Fields	Machine learning Reinforcement learning Self-supervised learning
Workplaces	Inria École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay Google DeepMind Meta AI
Theses	Adaptive Graph-Based Algorithms for Conditional Anomaly Detection and Semi-Supervised Learning  (2011) Bandits on graphs and structures (2016)
Doctoral advisor	Milos Hauskrecht
Website	misovalko.github.io

Michal Valko is a Slovak computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher based in France. His work spans international research institutions and global artificial intelligence laboratories, focusing on machine learning, reinforcement learning, representation learning and large language models.

Childhood and education

Michal Valko was born in Košice in Slovakia. His mother studied artificial intelligence at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, graduated in 1976 and his great-aunt worked on the ENIAC computer. Michal obtained his Master of Science degree in computer science from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2005. He subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, during which time he undertook a visiting research programme at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016, he was awarded a Habilitation to conduct research in Mathematics from the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay.

Professional career

Michal Valko began his research career with an internship at Intel Labs in Silicon Valley (2009–2010). In 2011, he joined the French national research institute Inria, where he secured a permanent position as a research fellow in 2012 and subsequently began lecturing on machine learning as part of the MVA master’s programme at ENS Paris-Saclay. He co-founding the Google DeepMind research laboratory in Paris, where he worked from 2019 to 2024. Following this, he joined Meta AI in Paris as a chief scientist and lead researcher focusing on reinforcement learning and the post-training optimization of foundation models. In 2025, he joined Isara Labs as a founding researcher.

Research

Michal Valko is the author of 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications, which have an h-index of 50. His contributions in this field include co-leading the Nash Learning from Human Feedback (NLHF) framework, discovering Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) self-learning method, which was published at the NeurIPS 2020 conference and the application of graph structures to sequential decision-making problems.

Public engagement

He serves as the scientific ambassador for the ESET Science Award and is a co-founder of the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School (EEML).

External links

• Official personal website
• ORCID profile