Hi! I’m Efe, a second-year PhD student in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University co-advised by Barnabás Póczos and Jeff Schneider. I’m broadly interested in reinforcement learning, uncertainty, exploration, and AI for scientific discovery.

I completed my undergraduate degree at Bilkent University, Turkey, in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. I worked with Cem Tekin and Çağın Ararat on bandits and optimization at the CYBORG Lab.

Apart from research, I’m a drummer (to varying degrees of success) and a big enjoyer of music—mostly classic rock, heavy metal, jazz fusion and progressive rock. I also like to read and think about philosophy, especially philosophy of mind.

News

Aug 2024: Started my PhD at CMU!
Jun 2024: Received my undergrad degree as the valedictorian! You can listen to my speech (if you know Turkish) from here.

Publications

Graph Transformer Neural Processes
under review, 2025
Efe Mert Karagözlü, Conor Igoe, Ian Char, Barnabás Póczos, Jeff Schneider

LeonArDBO: Fast and Prior-Driven Bayesian Optimization without Surrogate Modeling
Optimization for Machine Learning Workshop at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
Efe Mert Karagözlü, Conor Igoe, Barnabás Póczos, Jeff Schneider

Large Language Model-based Bayesian Optimization for Tokamak Stabilization
Machine Learning for Physical Sciences Workshop at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
Tejus Gupta, Rohit Sonker, Efe Mert Karagözlü, Alexandre Capone, Barnabás Póczos, Jeff Schneider

VOPy: A Framework for Black-box Vector Optimization
preprint, 2024
Yaşar Cahit Yıldırım, Efe Mert Karagözlü, İlter Onat Korkmaz, Çağın Ararat, Cem Tekin

Learning the Pareto Set Under Incomplete Preferences: Pure Exploration in Vector Bandits
Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2024
Efe Mert Karagözlü, Yaşar Cahit Yıldırım, Çağın Ararat, Cem Tekin