Bonus Theory Lunch (5/8 at 12:00 in GCS 502C)!

[Grayson York]

Hi all,

We will be having one additional theory lunch this week (5/8 at 12:00 in GCS 502C) where we will be honored to have Yang Cai from Yale speak. A brief bio for Yang is attached along with a title and abstract for the talk. Hope to see you all there!

Thanks,

Grayson

Bio: Yang Cai is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Economics (secondary appointment) at Yale University. He finished his Ph.D. at MIT in Computer Science and received his B.Sc. in EECS at Peking University. His research interests lie in theoretical computer science and its interface with economics, optimization, and machine learning. He has been honored with the FOCS Test of Time Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the William Dawson Scholarship, and the Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship.

Title: Learning and Games: A New Frontier in Algorithmic Game Theory

Abstract: Over the past decade, machine learning has achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of applications. This success is largely attributable to the paradigm of training machine learning systems by minimizing a single loss function using gradient-descent-based optimization algorithms. However, the landscape is shifting, and many of the outstanding challenges in machine learning now lie at its intersection with game theory. These challenges arise either from explicitly strategic environments—such as multi-agent reinforcement learning systems, autobidding in auctions, and algorithmic pricing—or from problems that can be implicitly modeled as games, such as robustifying models against adversarial attacks, training generative models, and alignment.