August Chen

Hi! I am a third year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University. I'm 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 worked as a Student Researcher with Claudio Gentile at Google Research. This summer 2026, I am visiting Shuangping Li at Yale University.

Research Interests: High-dimensional probability and statistics, learning theory, algorithms.

Contact: ayc74 at cornell.edu

Google Scholar

Research:

All authors are listed alphabetically unless otherwise stated.

How abundant are good interpolators?
With Ahmed El Alaoui.
Preprint 2026. [arXiv].

On the Robustness of Langevin Dynamics to Score Function Error.
With Daniel Yiming Cao, Karthik Sridharan, and Yuchen Wu.
43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026, to appear. [arXiv].

Statistical Learning from Attribution Sets.
With Lorne Applebaum, Robert Busa-Fekete, Claudio Gentile, Tomer Koren, and Aryan Mokhtari.
39th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2026, to appear. [arXiv].

Beyond the broken tetrahedron.
With Bjarne Schülke.
Combinatorics, Probability, and Computing. 35:1 (2026), pp. 59-70. [journal, arXiv].

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. [proc., 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].