Matthew Lai

Hello! I am a machine learning researcher currently living and working in London, England, as a Senior Research Engineer at Google DeepMind.

I specialise in deep reinforcement learning, graph neural networks, and combining machine learning with conventional algorithms to achieve results beyond what can be achieved using either alone. For example, see our previous work on AlphaGo Zero (PDF) and AlphaZero (open access preprint). My current research focus is in industrial robotics.

I used to be a professional electronics / embedded engineer, and I have a tech blog Dubious Creations, where I write about stuff I do outside of work – at the moment that’s mostly woodworking, DIY electronics, embedded systems, and making consumer gadgets.

Contact

Links

• Dubious Creations (my DIY/making blog)
  
• Curriculum vitae

Publications

• RoboBallet: Planning for multirobot reaching with graph neural networks and reinforcement learning
  Lai, M., Go, K., Li, Z., Kröger, T., Schaal, S., Allen, K., Scholz, J.,
  Science Robotics, 10(106), 2025.
  Full Text
• Generative interactive environments
  Bruce, J., Dennis, M.D., Edwards, A., Parker-Holder, J., Shi, Y., Hughes, E., Lai, M., Mavalankar, A., Steigerwald, R., Apps, C. and Aytar, Y.,
  Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024.
  Full Text
• A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play
  Silver, D., Hubert, T., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Lai, M., Guez, A., ... & Hassabis, D.
  Science, 362(6419), 1140-1144, 2018.
  Full Text
• Mastering the game of go without human knowledge.
  Silver, D., Schrittwieser, J., Simonyan, K., Antonoglou, I., Huang, A., Guez, A., Hubert, T., Baker, L., Lai, M., Bolton, A. and Chen, Y.,
  Nature, 550(7676), pp.354-359, 2018.
  Full Text (Subscription) Preprint
• Interaction networks for learning about objects, relations and physics
  Battaglia, P., Pascanu, R., Lai, M., & Jimenez Rezende, D.
  Advances in neural information processing systems, 29, 2016.
  Full Text
• Giraffe: Using deep reinforcement learning to play chess
  Lai, M.
  arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.01549.
  Full Text

Last updated: 4th Sept, 2025