About Me

My research focuses on probabilistic inference for generative modeling and inverse problems, combining optimal transport, energy-based models, and physics-informed priors.

I completed my PhD in AI at the University of Zurich and ETH AI Center, advised by Prof. Bjoern Menze. Previously, I was a Fellow at Harvard University (2023-2024) in Prof. Petros Koumoutsakos’s lab and worked at CERN (ATLAS), where I developed a machine-learning framework for collision-topology identification at the LHC.

I’m currently based in Zürich, Switzerland.

Email: m1balcerak[at]gmail.com

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CV · Personal Statement

News

Featured talk at Frontiers of Flows for Generative AI

MFAI Workshop, Spring 2026, Carnegie Mellon University / Workshop

Energy Matching crossed 200+ GitHub stars

Highlight / Code

Research Highlights

Generative Modeling

Energy-based generative models and optimal-transport training objectives for controllable sampling, learned priors, and composable generation.

Scientific AI / Inverse Problems

Physics-informed inverse methods for multimodal medical imaging and cancer modeling, including PDE- and elasticity-based priors.

Selected Publications

Graph Energy Matching: Transport-Aligned Energy-Based Modeling for Graph Generation

Michal Balcerak, Suprosanna Shit, Chinmay Prabhakar, Sebastian Kaltenbach, Michael S. Albergo, Yilun Du^†, Bjoern Menze^†

^† equal advising.

Preprint 2026 / Project / Paper / Code

Energy Matching: Unifying Flow Matching and Energy-Based Models for Generative Modeling

Michal Balcerak, Tamaz Amiranashvili, Antonio Terpin, Suprosanna Shit, Lea Bogensperger, Sebastian Kaltenbach, Petros Koumoutsakos, Bjoern Menze

NeurIPS 2025 / Paper / Code

Individualizing Glioma Radiotherapy Planning by Optimization of a Data- and Physics-Informed Discrete Loss

Michal Balcerak, Jonas Weidner, Petr Karnakov, Ivan Ezhov, Sergey Litvinov, Petros Koumoutsakos, Tamaz Amiranashvili, Ray Zirui Zhang, John S. Lowengrub, Igor Yakushev, Benedikt Wiestler^†, Bjoern Menze^†

^† equal advising.

Nature Communications 2025 / Paper / Code

Physics-Regularized Multi-Modal Image Assimilation for Brain Tumor Localization

Michal Balcerak, Tamaz Amiranashvili, Andreas Wagner, Jonas Weidner, Petr Karnakov, Johannes C. Paetzold, Ivan Ezhov, Petros Koumoutsakos, Benedikt Wiestler^†, Bjoern Menze^†

^† equal advising.

NeurIPS 2024 / Paper / Code