Selected Talks

2020-Present

Theoretical Foundations for Exploration and Self-Improvement with Language Models

IFDS Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Applied AI, University of Washington, August 2025
IAIFI Summer Workshop, Harvard University, August 2025
Exploration in AI Today Workshop (plenary), ICML 2025, July 2025

Is Behavior Cloning All You Need? Revisiting the Foundations of Imitation Learning

Reinforcement Learning Seminar, University of Virginia, April 2025
Coordinated Science Laboratory Seminar, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, March 2025
Statistics Seminar, Columbia University, February 2025
Cortex AI Seminar, Microsoft, February 2025
AI in Dynamic Decision-Making Seminar, JP Morgan, January 2025
Computer Science Colloquium, University of Connecticut, November 2024
Center Of Mathematical Sciences and Applications Seminar, Harvard University, November 2024
Machine Learning Seminar, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, November 2024
INFORMS 2024 (contributed), October 2024
Learning Theory Seminar, Google, September 2024
Aligning RL Experimentalists and Theorists Workshop (plenary), ICML 2024, July 2024

Scalable Online Exploration via Coverability

Tight Guarantees for Interactive Decision Making with the Decision-Estimation Coefficient

The Statistical Complexity of Interactive Decision Making

IFML Workshop on Generative AI, UT Austin, Sept 2023
Learning and Games Reunion Workshop, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, May 2023
ALG-ML Seminar, Princeton University, March 2023
ARC Seminar, Georgia Tech, Oct 2022
Workshop on Structure of Constraints in Decision Making, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley, Oct 2022
Simons Foundation Workshop on New Directions in Theoretical Machine Learning, Schloss Elmau, September 2022
BLISS Seminar, UC Berkeley, April 2022
Information Geometry Seminar, Stony Brook University, April 2022
RL Theory Virtual Seminar Series (website), Apr. 2022
CISS Conference, Princeton University, March 2022

Bridging Learning and Decision Making: Recent Progress on the Contextual Bandit Problem

Seminar Series in Cognitive Computing, Baidu Research, Oct. 2021.
IFDS Workshop on Statistical Approaches to Modern ML Methods, UW Madison, Aug. 2021
LeT-All Mentorship Workshop, COLT 2021, Aug. 2021.

Bridging Learning and Decision Making

Department of Computer Science, UT Austin, April 2021.
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, April 2021.
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, April 2021.
School of Computer Science, Georgia Tech, March 2021.
Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, March 2021.
Computer Science Department, Harvard University, March 2021.
Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, March 2021.
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, March 2021.
EECS Department, MIT, February 2021.
Department of Statistics, UW Madison, February 2021.
Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department, Caltech, February 2021.
Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, February 2021.
Department of Statistics and Data Science, Yale University, January 2021.
Microsoft Research, Redmond, January 2021.
Microsoft Research, New York, January 2021.
Microsoft Research, New England, January 2021.
Google Research NYC, Nov. 2020.

Instance-Dependent Complexity of Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning

Beyond UCB: Optimal and Efficient Contextual Bandits with Regression Oracles

Big Data and Machine Learning Seminar, UCLA, October 2020.
Computer Science Seminar, WPI, October 2020.
Statistics and Data Science Seminar, Yale, October 2020.
Stochastics and Statistics Seminar, MIT, September 2020.
Learning Theory Seminar, Google Research NYC, March 2020.
Young Researcher Seminar Series, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Feb. 2020.