Mingchen Ma (马铭辰)

PhD Student, Department of Computer Sciences, UW-Madison. 1210 W Dayton St, Madison, WI E-mail: myfirstname AT cs Dot wisc Dot edu

About me

I am a PhD student at the Department of Computer Sciences, UW-Madison since 2021. I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Christos Tzamos and Prof. Ilias Diakonikolas. I obtained my B.S. in Mathematics in 2020 from the Department of Mathematics at Nanjing University. Before officially starting my Ph.D. study, I spent a year as a visiting student at ITCS, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Research

My research interest lies in the union of theoretical machine learning, theoretical computer science, and optimization. My recent works focus on the adaptivity and robustness of learning problems.

Publications and Preprints
(Author orders for all papers are alphabetical)

1. Active Classification with Few Queries under Misspecification [conference version]
   with V.Kontonis, C. Tzamos
   Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)
   (Selected as a Spotlight Paper)

2. Active Learning of General Halfspaces: Label Queries vs Membership Queries [conference version]
   with I.Diakonikolas, D.Kane
   Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)

3. Active Learning with Simple Questions [arxiv]
   with V.Kontonis, C. Tzamos
   Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2024)

4. Fast Co-Training under Weak Dependence via Stream-Based Active Learning [conference version]
   with I.Diakonikolas, L. Ren, C.Tzamos
   Proceedings of the 41th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)
   (Selected for Oral Presentation)

5. The Gain from Ordering in Online Learning [conference version]
   with V.Kontonis, C. Tzamos
   Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

6. Buying Information for Stochastic Optimization [conference version]
   with C. Tzamos
   Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)
   (Selected for Oral Presentation)

7. Clustering with Queries under Semi-Random Noise [conference version]
   with A. Del Pia, C. Tzamos
   Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2022)

8. k-median: exact recovery in the extended stochastic ball model [journal version]
   with A. Del Pia
   Mathematical Programming, Series A 2022

9. Proximity in concave integer quadratic programming [journal version]
   with A. Del Pia
   Mathematical Programming, Series A 2021

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, CS 726, Nonlinear Optimization 1, Spring 2022

Teaching Assistant, CS 513, Numerical Linear Algebra, Spring 2024

Conference Reviewing

ITCS 2023, STOC 2023, NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025, ITCS 2025

Journal Reviewing

Mathematical Programming