Hi! I am a third 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.
In summer and fall 2025, I'm very fortunate to be working as a Student Researcher with Claudio Gentile at Google Research.
Research Interests: Broadly in high dimensional probability and statistics, theoretical machine learning, and algorithms.
Contact: ayc74 at cornell.edu
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.
39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025, to appear. [arXiv].
Beyond the broken tetrahedron.
With Bjarne Schülke.
Combinatorics, Probability, and Computing, to appear 2025+. [journal, arXiv].
Optimization, Isoperimetric Inequalities, and Sampling via Lyapunov Potentials.
With Karthik Sridharan.
38th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2025. [proc., arXiv].
Langevin Dynamics: A Unified Perspective on Optimization via Lyapunov Potentials.
With Ayush Sekhari and Karthik Sridharan.
Preprint 2024. [arXiv].
Preliminary version appeared at NeurIPS 2024 OPT workshop.