Daniel Herbst

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TUM Chair of Foundations of Deep Neural Networks

Friedrich-Ludwig-Bauer-Str. 5

85748 Garching, Germany

I am a PhD student in ML at Technical University of Munich under the mentorship of Prof. Stefanie Jegelka. Before starting my PhD, I earned an MSc in Mathematics at TU Munich, where I worked with the DAML group on symmetries and long-range interactions in graph neural networks (GNNs) as a research assistant, and was advised by Stefanie Jegelka for my Master thesis on transferability of GNNs. During my MSc, I also completed various industry internships as well as an exchange at University of Waterloo. Prior to this, I obtained a BSc in Mathematics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

My current research interests lie in the theory of machine learning, especially the interplay between weight-space geometry, parameter symmetries, training dynamics, and scaling. I am also interested in the theoretical foundations of graph learning and, more broadly, in principled approaches to learning with structure.

I am always open to collaborations and thesis/project supervisions (math or CS)—feel free to reach out! :slightly_smiling_face:

News

Jul 15, 2025 Honored to have been awarded the MDSI Doctoral Fellowship!
Jul 07, 2025 In London :uk: for the LOGML 2025 summer school, where I will be working on graph reasoning with LLMs.
Apr 23, 2025 In Singapore for ICLR 2025! :singapore:
Apr 10, 2025 Delivered talks at the 1W-MINDS Seminar and to the DAML group at TUM.
Mar 03, 2025 Excited to announce that I’ve officially started my PhD! :tada:

Selected publications

  1. ICML 2026 Oral, WSS@ICML26
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    Beyond Structural Symmetries: Linear Mode Connectivity via Neuron Identifiability
    International Conference on Machine Learning, Apr 2026
  2. ICLR 2025
    Spotlight
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    Higher-Order Graphon Neural Networks: Approximation and Cut Distance
    Daniel Herbst, and Stefanie Jegelka
    International Conference on Learning Representations, Feb 2025
  3. NeurIPS 2024
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    Spatio-Spectral Graph Neural Networks
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Sep 2024