Publications

In my field, we usually order authors alphabetically by last name.

1. Extracting Dual Solutions via Primal Optimizers
with Yair Carmon, Arun Jambulapati, and Aaron Sidford
ITCS 2025
[arXiv]

Overview: We give a general framework which reduces maximin optimization to minimax optimization, and then apply our framework to obtain new state-of-the-art algorithms for solving bilinear matrix games and the dual of CVaR distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Finally, as an illustration of its broader applicability, we apply our framework to recover the optimal query complexity for computing an approximate stationary point of a convex function.

2. The Burer-Monteiro SDP method can fail even above the Barvinok-Pataki bound
with Vaidehi Srinivas and Aravindan Vijayaraghavan
NeurIPS 2022
[arXiv] [recorded mini talk]

Overview: The Burer-Monteiro method is a popular heuristic for solving semidefinite programs (SDPs) in practice. We study the optimization landscape of this non-convex problem and construct a family of instances with high-rank spurious local minima, thereby justifying the use of beyond worst-case paradigms like smoothed analysis to obtain global convergence guarantees. A more detailed overview is available here.