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.

Selected Publications
(Author orders for all papers are alphabetical,Click here for a full list of publications)

Statistical Query Learning and Supervised Learning

• Learning Intersections of Two Margin Halfspaces under Factorizable Distributions
  with I.Diakonikolas, L. Ren, C.Tzamos
  Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2025)

• Statistical Query Hardness of Multiclass Linear Classification with Random Classification Noise [arxiv]
  with I.Diakonikolas, L. Ren, C.Tzamos
  Proceedings of the 42th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)
  (Selected for Oral Presentation)

Adaptivity-Efficiency-Robustness Tradeoff of Interactive Learning

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

• 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)

Algorithmic Applications of Interactive Learning

• 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)

• 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)

• 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)

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, ICML 2025, COLT 2025

Journal Reviewing

Mathematical Programming