I am a final-year PhD candidate in the Statistics department at UCLA and a
member of the Statistical Machine
Learning Lab led by Quanquan
Gu.
Starting in August of 2021, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley working with
Peter Bartlett and Bin Yu as a part of the NSF/Simons program Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning.
Research Interests
* Theory of deep learning: optimization, generalization, etc.
* Statistical learning theory
* Applications of deep learning: natural language understanding, audio
analysis, etc.
News
2021
* I'm giving a talk at the
ETH Zurich Young Data Science Researcher Seminar on April 14th.
* I'm reviewing for the
Theory of Overparameterized Machine Learning Workshop.
* I'm giving a talk at the
UCLA Big Data and Machine Learning Seminar on April 16th.
* I'm giving a talk at the
Max-Planck-Insitute (MPI) MiS Machine Learning Seminar on March 11th.
* New
paper showing SGD-trained neural networks of any width generalize in the presence of adversarial label noise.
* I'm reviewing for
ICML 2021.
2020
* New
paper on agnostic
learning of halfspaces using gradient descent is now on arXiv.
* My
single neuron paper
was accepted at NeurIPS 2020.
* I received a Best Reviewer Award for ICML 2020.
* I will be attending the
IDEAL
Special Quarter on the Theory of Deep Learning hosted by
TTIC/Northwestern for the fall quarter.
* I'm reviewing for
AISTATS
2021.
* I've been awarded a
Dissertation
Year Fellowship by UCLA's Graduate Division.
* New
paper on agnostic
PAC learning of a single neuron using gradient descent is now on arXiv.
* New
paper
accepted at
Brain Structure and Function from work with
researchers at UCLA School of Medicine.
* I'll be (remotely) working at Amazon's
Alexa
AI group for the summer as a research intern, working on natural
language understanding.
* I'm reviewing for
NeurIPS 2020.
* I'm reviewing for
ICML 2020.
2019
* My paper with Yuan Cao and Quanquan Gu, "Algorithm-dependent
Generalization Bounds for Overparameterized Deep Residual Networks", was
accepted at NeurIPS 2019 (
arXiv
version,
NeurIPS
version).
I am currently a PhD candidate in the Statistics department at UCLA
and a member of the Statistical
Machine Learning Lab. I am supervised by Ying
Nian Wu from the Department of Statistics and Quanquan
Gu from the Department of Computer Science. I completed my
masters in mathematics at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, in May 2015. I was a member of the Probability
Group, and Ed
Perkins was my supervisor. Before that, I completed my
undergraduate degree in mathematics at McGill University in 2013.
You may find more information about me on my CV
(last updated February 2021).
For 2020-2021, I have a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship and will
not be teaching.
Past teaching positions:
Spring 2020: Stats 100C, Linear Models with Arash Amini.
Fall 2019: Stats 102C, Monte Carlo Methods with Qing Zhou.
Summer 2016, Session C: Stats 10, Intro Statistics with Juana Sanchez.
Summer 2016, Session A: Stats 10, Intro Statistics with Miles Chen.
Fall 2016: Stats 100A, Introduction to Probability Theory with Ying
Nian Wu.
Winter 2016: Stats 100B, Introduction to Mathematical Statistics with
Jessica Li.
Preprints
1.
S. Frei, Y. Cao, and Q. Gu. Provable generalization of SGD-trained neural networks of any width in the presence of adversarial label noise. Preprint,
arXiv:2101.01152.
[arxiv]
2.
S. Frei, Y. Cao, and Q. Gu. Agnostic learning of halfspaces
with gradient descent via soft margins. Preprint,
arXiv:2010.00539.
[arxiv]
Refereed Conference Publications
3.
S. Frei, Y. Cao, and Q. Gu. Agnostic
learning of a single neuron with gradient descent. In
Advances in Neural
Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020.
[arxiv]
4.
S. Frei, Y. Cao, and Q. Gu. Algorithm-dependent
generalization bounds for overparameterized deep residual networks. In
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2019.
[arxiv],
[camera ready]
Journal Publications
5. A.E. Anderson, M. Diaz-Santos,
S. Frei et al.
Hemodynamic latency is associated with reduced intelligence across the
lifespan: an fMRI DCM study of aging, cerebrovascular integrity, and
cognitive ability.
Brain Structure and Function, 2020.
[link]
6.
S. Frei and E. Perkins. A
lower bound for
$p_c$ in range-
$R$
bond percolation in two and three dimensions.
Electronic Journal of Probability
21(56), 2016.
[link]
7.
S. Frei, K. Lockwood, G. Stewart, J. Boyer, and B.S. Tilley. On
thermal resistance in concentric residential geothermal heat
exchangers.
Journal of Engineering Mathematics 86(1),
2014.
[link]