Ankur Moitra's Homepage (original ) (raw ) Book
Essays
Robustness Meets Algorithms Technical Perspective: Jacob Steinhardt with Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li and Alistair Stewart Communications of the ACM May 2021, Research Highlights
Learning Topic Models -- Provably and Efficiently Technical Perspective: David Blei with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, Yoni Halpern, David Mimno, David Sontag, Yichen Wu and Michael Zhu Communications of the ACM April 2018, Research Highlights
Disentangling Gaussians Technical Perspective: Santosh Vempala with Adam Kalai and Greg Valiant Communications of the ACM February 2012, Research Highlights See also this related paper of Belkin and Sinha
Manuscripts
Papers
Model Stealing for Any Low-Rank Language Model with Allen Liu Proceedings of the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2025), to appear.
Bypassing the Noisy Parity Barrier: Learning Higher-Order Markov Random Fields from Dynamics with Jason Gaitonde and Elchanan Mossel Proceedings of the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2025), to appear.
Precise Error Rates for Computationally Efficient Testing with Alex Wein Annals of Statistics, to appear
Edit Distance Robust Watermarks via Indexing Pseudorandom Codes with Noah Golowich Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024), to appear
Structure Learning of Hamiltonians from Real-time Evolution with Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu and Ewin Tang Proceedings of the 65th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2024)
Exploration is Harder than Prediction: Cryptographically Separating Reinforcement Learning from Supervised Learning with Noah Golowich and Dhruv Rohatgi Proceedings of the 65th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2024)
High-Temperature Gibbs States are Unentangled and Efficiently Preparable (Quanta ) with Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu and Ewin TangQuantum Information Processing (QIP 2025) Invited Plenary Proceedings of the 65th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2024)
The Role of Inherent Bellman Error in Offline Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation with Noah Golowich Proceedings of the 1st Annual Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC 2024)
Linear Bellman Completeness Suffices for Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning with Few Actions with Noah Golowich Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2024)
The Power of an Adversary in Glauber Dynamics with Byron Chin, Elchanan Mossel and Colin Sandon Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2024)
Exploring and Learning in Sparse Linear MDPs without Computationally Intractable Oracles with Noah Golowich and Dhruv Rohatgi Proceedings of the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024)
Learning Quantum Hamiltonians at Any Temperature in Polynomial Time (Quanta ) with Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu and Ewin TangInvited to the SIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for STOC 2024 Quantum Information Processing (QIP 2024) Invited Plenary Proceedings of the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024)
Provable Benefits of Score Matching with Chirag Pabbaraju, Anish Sevekari, Holden Lee, Andrej Risteski and Dhruv Rohatgi Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Spotlight
Strong Spatial Mixing for Colorings on Trees and its Algorithmic Applications with Zongchen Chen, Kuikui Liu and Nitya Mani Journal of the ACM, to appear Proceedings of the 64th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023)
Tensor Decompositions Meet Control Theory: Learning General Mixtures of Linear Dynamical Systems with Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu and Morris Yau Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)
A New Approach to Learning Linear Dynamical Systems with Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu and Morris Yau Proceedings of the 55th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2023)
Planning and Learning in Partially Observable Systems via Filter Stability with Noah Golowich and Dhruv Rohatgi Proceedings of the 55th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2023)
Distilling Model Failures as Directions in Latent Space with Saachi Jain, Hannah Lawrence and Aleksander Madry The 11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023) Spotlight
Provably Auditing Ordinary Least Squares in Low Dimensions with Dhruv Rohatgi The 11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023)
From Algorithms to Connectivity and Back: Finding a Giant Component in Random k-SAT with Zongchen Chen and Nitya Mani Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2023)
Robust Voting Rules from Algorithmic Robust Statistics with Allen Liu Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2023)
Learning in Observable POMDPs, without Computationally Intractable Oracles with Noah Golowich and Dhruv Rohatgi Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022)
Robust Model Selection and Nearly-Proper Learning for GMMs with Jerry Li and Allen Liu Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022)
Polynomial Time Guarantees for the Burer-Monteiro Method with Diego Cifuentes Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022)
Minimax Rates for Robust Community Detection with Allen Liu Proceedings of the 63rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2022)
Can Q-Learning be Improved with Advice? with Noah Golowich Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2022)
Learning GMMs with Nearly Optimal Robustness Guarantees with Allen Liu Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2022)
Kalman Filtering with Adversarial Corruptions with Sitan Chen, Frederic Koehler and Morris Yau Proceedings of the 54th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2022)
A No-go Theorem for Acceleration in the Hyperbolic Plane with Linus Hamilton Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)
Online and Distribution-Free Robustness: Regression and Contextual Bandits with Huber Contamination with Sitan Chen, Frederic Koehler and Morris Yau Proceedings of the 62nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2021)
Learning to Sample from Censored Markov Random Fields with Elchanan Mossel and Colin Sandon Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2021)
Settling the Robust Learnability of Mixtures of Gaussians with Allen Liu Journal of the ACM Proceedings of the 53rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2021)
Algorithmic Foundations for the Diffraction Limit with Sitan Chen Proceedings of the 53rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2021)
Classification Under Misspecification: Halfspaces, Generalized Linear Models, and Connections to Evolvability with Sitan Chen, Frederic Koehler and Morris Yau Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020), Spotlight
Tensor Completion Made Practical with Allen Liu Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020)
Learning Structured Distributions from Untrusted Batches: Faster and Simpler with Sitan Chen and Jerry Li Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020)
Learning Some Popular Gaussian Graphical Models without Condition Number Bounds with Jonathan Kelner, Frederic Koehler and Raghu Meka Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020), Spotlight
Rigorous Guarantees for Tyler's M-estimator via Quantum Expansion with Cole Franks Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2020)
Parallels Between Phase Transitions and Circuit Complexity? with Elchanan Mossel and Colin Sandon Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2020)
Better Algorithms for Estimating Non-Parametric Models in Crowd-Sourcing and Rank Aggregation with Allen Liu Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2020)
Efficiently Learning Structured Distributions from Untrusted Batches with Sitan Chen and Jerry Li Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2020)
Spectral Methods from Tensor Networks with Alex WeinInvited to the SIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for STOC 2019 Proceedings of the 51st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2019)
Learning Restricted Boltzmann Machines via Influence Maximization with Guy Bresler and Frederic Koehler Proceedings of the 51st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2019)
Beyond the Low-Degree Algorithm: Mixtures of Subcubes and Their Applications with Sitan Chen Proceedings of the 51st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2019)
How Many Subpopulations is Too Many? Exponential Lower Bounds for Inferring Population Histories with Younhun Kim, Frederic Koehler, Elchanan Mossel and Govind RamnarayanJournal of Computational Biology Special Issue for RECOMB 2019 Proceedings of the 23rd Intl. Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2019)
The Paulsen Problem Made Simple with Linus Hamilton Israel Journal of Mathematics Proceedings of the 10th Annual Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS 2019)
Improved Bounds for Sampling Colorings via Linear Programming with Sitan Chen, Michelle Delcourt, Guillem Perarnau and Luke Postle Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2019)
Efficiently Learning Mixtures of Mallows Models with Allen Liu Proceedings of the 59th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2018)
Optimality and Suboptimality of PCA I: Spiked Random Matrix Models with Amelia Perry, Alex Wein and Afonso Bandeira Annals of Statistics, 2018
Robustly Learning a Gaussian: Getting Optimal Error, Efficiently with Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li and Alistair Stewart Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2018)
Message-Passing Algorithms for Synchronization Problems over Compact Groups with Amelia Perry, Alex Wein and Afonso Bandeira Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2018
Information Theoretic Properties of Markov Random Fields, and their Algorithmic Applications with Linus Hamilton and Frederic Koehler Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)
Learning Determinantal Point Processes with Moments and Cycles with John Urschel, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel and Philippe Rigollet Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2017)
Being Robust (in High Dimensions) Can Be Practical with Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li and Alistair Stewart Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2017)
Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Determinantal Point Processes with Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Philippe Rigollet and John Urschel Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2017)
Approximate Counting, the Lovasz Local Lemma and Inference in Graphical Models Journal of the ACM Proceedings of the 49th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2017)
A Nearly Tight Sum-of-Squares Lower Bound for the Planted Clique Problem with Boaz Barak, Sam Hopkins, Jonathan Kelner, Pravesh Kothari and Aaron PotechinSIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for FOCS 2016 Proceedings of the 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2016)
Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability with Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Daniel Kane, Jerry Li and Alistair StewartInvited to Communications of the ACM, Research Highlights SIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for FOCS 2016 Proceedings of the 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2016)
Provable Algorithms for Inference in Topic Models with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, Frederic Koehler and Tengyu Ma Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2016)
How Robust are Reconstruction Thresholds for Community Detection? with Will Perry and Alex Wein Proceedings of the 48th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2016)
Noisy Tensor Completion via the Sum-of-Squares Hierarchy with Boaz BarakMathematical Programming, Series B Special Issue Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2016)
Beating the Random Assignment on Constraint Satisfaction Problems of Bounded Degree with Boaz Barak, Ryan O'Donnell, Prasad Raghavendra, Oded Regev, David Steurer, Luca Trevisan, Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, David Witmer and John Wright Workshop on Approximation, Randomization and Combinatorial Optimization (APPROX 2015)
Simple, Efficient and Neural Algorithms for Sparse Coding with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge and Tengyu Ma Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2015)
Super-resolution, Extremal Functions and the Condition Number of Vandermonde Matrices Proceedings of the 47th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2015)
New Algorithms for Learning Incoherent and Overcomplete Dictionaries with Sanjeev Arora and Rong Ge Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2014)
Smoothed Analysis of Tensor Decompositions with Aditya Bhaskara, Moses Charikar and Aravindan Vijayaraghavan Proceedings of the 46th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2014)
A Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme for Fault-tolerant Distributed Storage with Constantinos Daskalakis, Anindya De, Ilias Diakonikolas and Rocco Servedio Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2014)
A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Lossy Population Recovery with Michael Saks Proceedings of the 54th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2013)
Algorithms and Hardness for Robust Subspace Recovery with Moritz Hardt Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2013)
A Practical Algorithm for Topic Modeling with Provable Guarantees with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, Yoni Halpern, David Mimno, David Sontag, Yichen Wu and Michael ZhuInvited to Communications of the ACM, Research Highlights Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2013)
An Information Complexity Approach to Extended Formulations with Mark Braverman Proceedings of the 45th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2013)
An Almost Optimal Algorithm for Computing Nonnegative Rank SIAM Journal on Computing Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2013)
Provable ICA with Unknown Gaussian Noise, and Implications for Gaussian Mixtures and Autoencoders with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge and Sushant SachdevaAlgorithmica Special Issue for Machine Learning Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS 2012)
Learning Topic Models -- Going Beyond SVD with Sanjeev Arora and Rong Ge Proceedings of the 53rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2012)
Computing a Nonnegative Matrix Factorization -- Provably with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge and Ravi KannanSIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for STOC 2012 Proceedings of the 44th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2012)
Nearly Complete Graphs Decomposable into Large Induced Matchings and their Applications with Noga Alon and Benny Sudakov Journal of the European Mathematical Society Proceedings of the 44th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2012)
On Entropy and Extensions of Posets with Tom Leighton Manuscript, 2011
Efficient and Explicit Coding for Interactive Communication with Ran Gelles and Amit Sahai IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Proceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2011)
Pareto Optimal Solutions for Smoothed Analysts with Ryan O'DonnellSIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for STOC 2011 Proceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2011)
Dueling Algorithms Related: MIT News with Nicole Immorlica, Adam Kalai, Brendan Lucier, Andrew Postlewaite and Moshe Tennenholtz Proceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2011)
Capacitated Metric Labeling with Matthew Andrews, Mohammadtaghi Hajiaghayi and Howard Karloff Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2011)
Settling the Polynomial Learnability of Mixtures of Gaussians with Greg ValiantInvited to Communications of the ACM, Research Highlights Proceedings of the 51st Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2010)
Vertex Sparsifiers and Abstract Rounding Algorithms with Moses Charikar, Tom Leighton and Shi Li Proceedings of the 51st Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2010)
Efficiently Learning Mixtures of Two Gaussians with Adam Kalai and Greg Valiant Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2010)
Extensions and Limits to Vertex Sparsification with Tom Leighton Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2010)
Vertex Sparsification and Oblivious Reductions SIAM Journal on Computing Special Issue for FOCS 2009 Proceedings of the 50th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2009)
Some Results on Greedy Embeddings in Metric Spaces with Tom Leighton Discrete and Computational Geometry (Invited ) Proceedings of the 49th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2008)
Thesis