Sahel Iqbal
I’m Sahel Iqbal, a third-year PhD student at Aalto University, Finland, where I work with Simo Särkkä. My main research focus is on developing accurate and efficient Monte Carlo algorithms for reinforcement learning and Bayesian experimental design (BED). Recently, I have also developed an interest in how similar algorithms can be used for inference-time alignment of diffusion and large language models.
For details regarding my research, see my Google Scholar profile. I can be contacted on X and at my email sahel[dot]iqbal[at]aalto[dot]fi.
Outside work, my time is mostly taken up by reading, lifting weights, and writing JAX code. The projects that I’m actively working on are available on GitHub.
Recent Posts
2026-03-20
Asynchronous Data Copies in CuTe DSL — Part 1 of a multi-part series on GPU kernel development with NVIDIA’s CuTe domain-specific language.
2025-10-09
Steering Language Models with Sequential Monte Carlo — How to give your language model the blues with SMC.
2025-09-24
Using LaTeX Snippets in Markdown Files in Neovim — How I adapted my LuaSnip LaTeX snippets to work in Markdown for easier math note-taking in Neovim.
Recent News
2026-03: Our paper Maximin robust Bayesian experimental design is now out on ArXiv. We propose a worst-case decision-making rule for dealing with misspecified models in Bayesian experimental design.
2026-01: We released a new JAX library for inference in state-space models called
cuthbert! Checkout the tweet and the code.2025-09: Our paper Sequential Monte Carlo for Policy Optimization in Continuous POMDPs has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025!