Organizers:
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When faced with a statistical task, how can we determine if an IC tradeoff exists? Unfortunately, traditional methods from worst-case complexity theory, such as NP-hardness, seem inadequate for this purpose. Recent work at the interface of theoretical computer science and statistics has made notable progress in our understanding of this broad question. Roughly speaking, two interconnected approaches have emerged. One approach, similar to classical complexity theory, involves developing efficient reductions from problems believed to be hard on average (e.g., planted clique or LWE). The other approach focuses on establishing unconditional lower bounds within broad (yet restricted) computational models—such as Statistical Query (SQ) algorithms, low-degree polynomials, and Sum-of-Squares (SoS) algorithms. These complementary methodologies have provided strong evidence of IC tradeoffs across various statistical tasks. Despite these recent advances, we are still a long way from a unified theory that identifies the underlying causes of these tradeoffs.
Time | Talk | 8:45-9:15 | Continental Breakfast |
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9:15-9:30 | Address by Avrim Blum |
9:30-10:30 | Alex Wein (UC Davis) Low-Degree Polynomials: Overview and Recent Developments |
10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break |
11:00-11:45 | Jerry Li (UW) Rigorous Implications of the Low-Degree Heuristic | 11:45-12:45 | Lunch at TTIC |
12:45-01:45 | Mark Sellke (Harvard) Recent Developments on the Overlap Gap Property | 1:45-2:30 | Brice Huang (MIT) Algorithmic threshold for the random perceptron |
2:30-2:45 | Coffee Break |
2:45-3:30 | Tim Kunisky (Johns Hopkins) Lower bounds against low coordinate degree algorithms |
3:30-4:15 | Sihan Liu (UCSD) PTF Lower Bounds for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis |
4:15-4:30 | Coffee Break |
4:30 - 5:30 | Open Problems Session |
Time | Talk | 9:00-9:30 | Continental Breakfast |
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9:30-10:30 | David Steurer (ETH) From proofs to algorithms: robust and private statistics via sum-of-squares |
10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break |
11:00-12:00 | Aaron Potechin (U Chicago) Sum of Squares Lower Bounds for Average Case Problems | 12:00-1:00 | Lunch at TTIC |
1:00-1:45 | Shuo Pang (Bristol) Sum-of-Squares Lower Bounds for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis: Challenges and New Techniques |
1:45 - 2:30 | Jeff Xu (CMU) SoS Lower Bounds for Coloring Random Graphs |
2:30-2:45 | Coffee Break |
2:45-3:15 | Ankit Pensia (UC Berkeley) SoS Certifiability of Subgaussian Distributions |
3:15-4:00 | Chris Jones (Bocconi) What is a Feynman diagram? |
4:00-4:15 | Coffee Break |
4:15-5:00 | Ilias Zadik (Yale) The (optimized) Franz-Parisi criterion and its equivalence with LD/SQ lower bounds |
Time | Talk | 9:00-9:30 | Continental Breakfast |
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9:30-10:30 | Cynthia Rush (Columbia) Survey on AMP |
11:30-11:00 | Coffee Break |
11:00-12:00 | Fred Koehler (U Chicago) Recent Developments on Sparse Linear Regression | 12:00-1:30 | Lunch (on your own) |
1:30-2:10 | Neekon Vafa (MIT) Reducing Lattice Problems to Statistical Tasks via (Continuous) Learning With Errors |
2:10-2:50 | Lisheng Ren (UW Madison) Hardness of Learning Halfspaces under the LWE assumption |
2:50-3:30 | Ansh Nagda (UC Berkeley) On optimal distinguishers for planted clique |
3:30-3:40 | Coffee Break |
3:40-4:20 | Mingchen Ma (UW Madison) Learning Intersections of Two Margin Halfspaces under Factorizable Distributions | 4:20-5:00 | Giannis Iakovidis (UW Madison) Information-Computation Tradeoffs in Learning Multi-Index Models |