Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Markovian Random Words, a Gaussian Random Matrix Model and Beyond

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, November 5, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 202
Speaker
Christian Houdré – Georgia Institute of Technology –

After centering and scaling, the length of the longest weakly increasing subsequences of a finite-state Markov random word converges to a Brownian last-passage functional with dependent components. We investigate when this functional, and more generally the limiting Robinson–Schensted–Knuth (RSK) Young-diagram shape, admits a Gaussian random-matrix representation. We introduce Hermitian Gaussian matrices with correlated diagonal entries and show that isotropy of the Brownian covariance on the trace-zero hyperplane yields such a representation. Within this natural class of Hermitian models with independent Gaussian off-diagonal entries, we prove a rigidity theorem showing that isotropy, together with equality of the off-diagonal variances, characterizes the conditional largest-eigenvalue representation. Explicit three-letter non-cyclic Markov chains demonstrate that this representation is not universal: the

limiting Brownian functional may fail to have the law of the largest eigenvalue of {\it any} centered jointly Gaussian $3\times 3$ Hermitian matrix. Finally, we extend the random-matrix identification to chains with non-uniform stationary distributions and to countable state spaces.

Joint work with Dorian Kidonakis

The Gamma-disordered Aztec diamond

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, October 29, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Roger Van Peski – Columbia University –

The dimer model, i.e. random perfect matchings of a bipartite graph, is a classical object about which much is known. As soon as one biases the probability measure by edge weights which are themselves random, very little is known rigorously, though physicists have studied such models for several decades and made extensive predictions. I will discuss a new integrable model in this class (the Gamma-disordered Aztec diamond) which allows us to prove results on the free energy, and also exhibits surprising relations to integrable polymer models which lead to probabilistic results on tilings. Joint work with Maurice Duits (KTH), https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03033.

Sampling and Inference Time Computation (Unusual Room!)

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, October 22, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 254
Speaker
Abhishek Shetty – Georgia Institute of Technology –

The success of modern generative models (LLMs) is a technological breakthrough, but foundations on which it is built has remained largely a mystery. A foundational understanding of the distributions that they sample from would vastly improve our ability to both diagnose potential issues (e.g. from a safety perspective) and also ability to push the applications of these models (e.g. in challenging settings such as scientific discovery). In this talk, I will broadly survey some aspects of work in this line while zooming in on a particular aspect: understanding sampling at inference time. In particular, we ask the question of how we can elicit, understand and control new behavior from language models particularly aimed towards long horizon tasks such as reasoning. Typical algorithmic interventions here suffer the issue of having errors compound with the time horizon. In this talk, we will see how these questions here can be connected to classical algorithmic questions from the theory of sampling and Markov chain Monte Carlo.  Using this new perspective, we will present an algorithm VGB, that circumvents compounding of error with the horizon. Time permitting, we will survey the broader algorithmic landscape, with further connections to particle filtering and stochastic control. 

 

This talk is based on joint work with Dhruv Rohatgi, Yuchen Li, Donya Salless, Andrej Risteski, Ankur Moitra and Dylan Foster.

Characteristic polynomials of non-Hermitian random matrices

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, October 15, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Tatyana Shcherbyna – University of Wisconsin-Madison –

We are going to discuss recent developments in the study of the local asymptotic behavior of the second correlation function of characteristic polynomials for several important examples of non-Hermitian random matrices including adjacency matrices of weighted Erdos-Renyi graphs and  band matrices, where non-zero entries are present only in the narrow strip around the main diagonal. The talk is based on the joint papers with Ievgenii Afanasiev and Maria Shcherbina.

A first-order phase transition for the triangle lower tail in sparse random graphs

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, October 8, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Byron Chin – Georgia Tech –

We study the graphon variational problem that governs lower tail large deviations of the triangle count in a sparse Erdős--Rényi random graph G(n,p). We deduce that the replica-symmetric and symmetry-breaking regimes are separated by a single critical parameter q_c and that the phase transition is first-order. I’ll also discuss tools to transfer these results to the conditioned random graph, showing for example that the edge density is a discontinuous order parameter.

Exponential Rank Bounds for Random Matrices

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, October 1, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Achintya Polavarapu – Georgia Tech –

A basic question in random matrix theory is how likely a matrix is to have a large rank. For many classical models, this probability decays extremely quickly, but the strongest results often rely on the entries being identically distributed. In this talk, I will discuss how to obtain the same exponential scale for matrices with fully independent, non-identically distributed entries under only a uniform anti-concentration assumption and explain the main ideas that make this possible.

Stein method, Malliavin calculus and asymptotic independence

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, September 24, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ciprian Tudor – Université de Lille 1

 

We develop an extension of the Stein-Malliavin calculus which allows to measure the Wasserstein distance between the probability distributions of $ (X, Y)$ and $(Z,Y)$, where $X,Y$ are arbitrary random vectors and $ Z\sim N(0, \sigma ^{2})$ is independent of $Y$. In particular, this method allows to quantify the asymptotic independence between sequences of random variables and vectors. We will discuss some particular applications of this method to various limit theorems.

Diffusion Approximation of a Proportional Processor Sharing Queue with Reneging

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, September 10, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Eva Loeser – UNC Chapel Hill –

Abstract: In the early 2000s, substantial work was devoted to understanding the generally distributed processor-sharing queue, which can be viewed as an idealization of round-robin or time-sharing protocols arising in computer-system applications. The fluid limit for a processor-sharing queue with reneging was established, but the diffusion limit for a processor-sharing queue with impatience was obtained only under a “soft deadlines” formulation, in which the patience times of jobs are tracked but jobs do not actually leave the queue when their patience times expire. This limitation was largely a consequence of the methodology underlying that research program: much of the analysis relied on heavy-traffic limits and the state-space-collapse framework introduced by Bramson and Williams, which is not naturally suited to systems with reneging. More recent work has developed methods for obtaining diffusion approximations of measure-valued queueing systems using classical central limit theorem analysis, martingale methods, and SPDE-valued limits (see work by Ramanan and by the author of this talk). Using these methods, the diffusion approximation for a processor-sharing queue with true reneging can be obtained.

Bio: Eva Loeser is a postdoctoral research associate in the Applied Probability Group in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include stochastic processes, particularly fluid and diffusion approximations of stochastic systems, high-dimensional stochastic processes, and universal limiting objects such as stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) and semimartingale reflecting Brownian motions (SRBMs). The models she studies arise in applications including systems biology, computer systems, queueing theory, operations research, and mathematical physics.

Asymptotically half of binary words are shuffle squares

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, April 16, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Logan Post – Georgia Institute of Technology –

A binary shuffle square is a binary word of even length that can be partitioned into two disjoint, identical subwords. While recognizing shuffle squares is NP-hard, we show that they are surprisingly ubiquitous. We prove that a uniformly random binary word $s$ of length $2n$ is a shuffle square with probability $\frac 12-o(n^{-1/15})$, verifying a conjecture of He, Huang, Nam, and Thaper. In particular, almost every binary word is at most two bit-deletions away from a shuffle square, giving the best possible average case for the “Longest Twin” problem.

 

By revealing the bits of $s$ sequentially,  we reformulate the problem as a discrete stochastic process. We track the evolution of a “buffer set”, a collection of suffixes produced by the revealed bits. In this setting, there is a simple greedy algorithm which behaves like a SSRW; we define a local optimization which creates a negative bias. We also show that the buffer set is robust enough to absorb small defects, yielding a perfect partition with high probability.

Minimax D-Optimal designs in generalized linear models: Nonasymptotic theory and efficient algorithms

Series
Stochastics Seminar
Time
Thursday, April 9, 2026 - 15:30 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Jacob Aguirre – Georgia Tech –

We study robust D-optimal experiment design in generalized linear models, choosing design weights to maximize the worst-case determinant of the Fisher information matrix over a convex parameter uncertainty set. This can be thought of as the natural generalization of D-optimal design in linear regression, and the key challenge is that the information matrix depends on the parameter, so the resulting minimax problem is generally not convex-concave. We show that the desired convexity-concavity, in fact, reduces to a scalar curvature condition on the log-partition function of the exponential family, namely its second derivative h must satisfy the inequality h''h ≥ q(h')² for some q > 1. This insight is connected to the notion of Volumetric Barrier (VB) convexity for self-concordant functions, a result first introduced by Tseng et al (2025) in the context of online quantum state estimation. With self-concordant barriers on the design weights simplex and the parameter uncertainty set, the regularized saddle objective becomes a self-concordant convex-concave (SCCC) function, enabling efficient minimax interior-point methods developed by Nemirovski. We also consider the generalization of the framework, where convexity in the model parameter breaks, but the q-inequality holds up to a deficit proportional to h; in this case, our methods are just as applicable. It turns out that this class includes all canonical GLMs, and we identify logistic regression as the hardest model in the class.

This joint work with Dmitrii Ostrovskii.

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