Swann Bessa
i like to cluster stuff
I'm a PhD student at FAIR (Meta) and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, working on large-scale clustering and vector search. My research interests sit at the intersection of machine learning and combinatorial/algorithmic problems.
Before my PhD I completed an MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Oxford, and the Cycle Ingénieur (MSc) at Ecole Polytechnique. I've interned at FAIR under Matthijs Douze and Hervé Jégou, and previously at the CORAIL research group (Polytechnique Montréal) on combinatorial optimization.
I'm always down for a chat, so feel free to reach out at swann [at] meta [dot] com.
News
- 2026 (Sep.) — Submitted e-means to ICLR. Really proud of this work, k-means is very widely used in industrial applications, and e-means beats it in about 10x less epochs on a wide range of scales and datasets. Can’t wait to release it publicly in early November.
- 2026 — “Cluster with Auctions for Vector Search” accepted at NeurIPS 2026.
- 2026 (Jun.) — Started my PhD at FAIR & Ecole des Ponts, on large-scale clustering and vector search.
- 2025 (Sep.) — Excited to join Meta FAIR for a research internship under Matthijs Douze and Hervé Jégou.
- 2025 (Aug.) — Finished my MSc at Oxford. Leaving great memories behind at St Hilda’s College.
- 2025 — “Learning Valid Dual Bounds in Constraint Programming” accepted at AAAI 2025.