2025
Student Seminar: Xiang Lu
2:00–2:30 pm Jones 111
Monday April 28, 2025, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Xiang Lu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Special orthogonal, special unitary, and symplectic groups as products of Grassmannians”
Student Seminar: Yilong Chen
1:00–1:30 pm Jones 111
Monday April 28, 2025, at 1:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Yilong Chen, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Categorical Variational Autoencoder for Count Tensor Decomposition”
Bahadur Memorial Lectures: John Lafferty (Day 1)
11:30 am–12:30 pm Jones 303
Title: Abstraction in Artificial and Natural Intelligence: Part I: Relational and Sequential Reasoning
Abstract: Two broad types of natural intelligence are used by humans (and other animals). One type is used to acquire semantic and procedural knowledge about the world. Another type is used to identify novel associations and relations. This second type of intelligence often requires very little data, but significant time to “think” and search for solutions; recent AI models mimic this type of intelligence using “chain of thought.” We present a framework for modeling relational learning and abstraction, using an inductive bias called the relational bottleneck. To assess the flexibility of the relational bottleneck, a universal approximation theory is developed. To analyze the advantages of sequential reasoning, an extension of statistical learning theory for autoregressive models is proposed. This offers insight into how chain of thought sequential supervision can improve learning efficiency.
Student Seminar: Terry Yuan
2:00–2:30 pm Jones 303
Wednesday, April 23, 2025, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Terry Yuan, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Online Inference Using Parallel ROOT Stochastic Gradient Descent”
Student Seminar: Yukai Yang
11:30 am–12:00 pm Jones 111
Tuesday, April 22, 2025, at 11:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Yukai Yang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“TBA”
Statistics Colloquium: Linjun Zhang
11:30 am–12:30 pm Jones 303
Linjun Zhang Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics, at Rutgers University
Title: A Statistical Hypothesis Testing Framework for Data Misappropriation Detection in Large Language Models
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly gaining enormous popularity in recent years. However, the training of LLMs has raised significant privacy and legal concerns, particularly regarding the inclusion of copyrighted materials in their training data without proper attribution or licensing, which falls under the broader issue of data misappropriation. In this article, we focus on a specific problem of data misappropriation detection, namely, to determine whether a given LLM has incorporated data generated by another LLM. To address this issue, we propose embedding watermarks into the copyrighted training data and formulating the detection of data misappropriation as a hypothesis testing problem. We develop a general statistical testing framework, construct a pivotal statistic, determine the optimal rejection threshold, and explicitly control the type I and type II errors. Furthermore, we establish the asymptotic optimality properties of the proposed tests, and demonstrate its empirical effectiveness through intensive numerical experiments.
Student Seminars: Wei Kuang
3:00–5:00 pm Cobb 203
Friday, April 18, 2025, at 3:00 PM, in Cobb 203, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Wei Kuang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Estimation Using Second-Order Methods”
Student Seminar: Oscar Liu
2:00–3:00 pm Ryerson 176
Friday, April 18, 2025, at 2:00 PM, in Ryerson 176, 1100 E 58th St.
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Oscar Liu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Bias Correction of Ground Temperature in Hawaii Using Gaussian Process Models”
Student Seminar: Zihao Wang
1:00–3:00 pm Jones 226
Friday, April 18, 2025, at 1:00 PM, in Jones 226, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Zihao Wang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Understanding and Steering Large Generative Models: From Representation Geometry to Stress-Testing Generative Behavior”
Student Seminars: YoonHaeng Hur
10:00 am–12:00 pm Ryerson 255
Friday, April 18, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Ryerson 255, 1100 E 58th St.
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
YoonHaeng Hur, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Infinite-Dimensional Inference and Learning via Optimal Transport”