I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to Cornell, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. in 2023 from the Department of Statistics at Stanford University, advised by Professor Andrea Montanari. I received my Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Tsinghua University.

My research focuses on establishing rigorous foundations for statistical and machine learning methods, while also developing new algorithms guided by theoretical insights. Specifically, I have been working on:
  • Analyzing and developing sampling algorithms with applications to Bayesian statistics and diffusion models
  • Computational–statistical tradeoffs in high-dimensional statistical settings
  • Mechanism design under misaligned incentives and information asymmetry
  • Learning from machine-generated data

Here is my Google Scholar page and CV.

Open to research discussions, feel free to reach out!

News

  • [05/2026] New preprint online: We study model collapse in an interactive learning environment, investigating how statistical learning methods behave when synthetic data is mixed into the training dataset. Our findings suggest that the pattern of model interactions is crucial in determining the occurrence of model collapse.
  • [06/2025] New preprint online: We design an online learning algorithm for a generalized principal agent model, tackling strategic agents and information asymmetry
  • [01/2025] Our paper on learning graphical models through denoising diffusion models is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • [10/2024] New preprint online: We design a training-free acceleration method for diffusion models
  • [10/2024] Invited talks at S. S. Wilks Memorial Seminar in Statistics at Princeton University, Cornell ORIE Young Researchers Workshop, INFORMS Annual Meeting, FDS Conference: Recent Advances and Future Directions for Sampling at Yale University, and Applied Probability Seminar at Columbia University
  • Archive
  • [08/2024] I am organizing a session "Advances in the Theory of Modern Sampling Algorithms" at JSM 2024, join us in room CC-C122 on August 7th from 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
  • [06/2024 to 07/2024] I am teaching a course "STAT 1010 Introductory Business Statistics" at Upenn
  • [06/2024] New preprint online: We design a novel sampling algorithm via decomposing the target posterior into log-concave mixture of simpler ones
  • [06/2024] Our paper on tensor PCA is accepted to Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR)
  • [05/2024] Our paper on statistical limits for low-rank matrix estimation is accepted to The Annals of Statistics (AoS)
  • [05/2024] Invited talk at “Youth in high dimensions” conference at ICTP, Trieste
  • [05/2024] Our paper on theoretical insights of diffusion guidance is accepted to ICML 2024
  • [05/2024] Oral presentation at AISTATS 2024
Email: yuchen.wu@cornell.edu