August Chen

Hi! I am a second year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University. I am very fortunate to be advised by Professors Ahmed El Alaoui and Karthik Sridharan. I completed my undergraduate studies in mathematics at Caltech.

Research Interests: Broadly in machine learning, high dimensional probability, and algorithms. Recently I have focused on optimization and sampling algorithms in high dimensional settings.

Contact: ayc74 at cornell.edu

Google Scholar

Research:

All authors are listed alphabetically unless otherwise stated.

Efficiently Escaping Saddle Points under Generalized Smoothness via Self-Bounding Regularity.
With Daniel Yiming Cao, Karthik Sridharan, and Benjamin Tang.
Submitted 2025. arXiv.

Beyond the broken tetrahedron.
With Bjarne Schülke.
Submitted 2025. arXiv.

Langevin Dynamics: A Unified Perspective on Optimization via Lyapunov Potentials.
With Ayush Sekhari and Karthik Sridharan.
Submitted 2024. Preliminary version appeared at NeurIPS 2024 OPT workshop. arXiv.

Optimization, Isoperimetric Inequalities, and Sampling via Lyapunov Potentials.
With Karthik Sridharan.
Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2025, to appear. arXiv.