Christos Thrampoulidis

E-mail: cthrampo AT ece (-dot-) ubc (-dot-) ca

About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the ECE Department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. I am also member of the MILD group at UBC. Previously, I was Assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

I do research on machine learning and deep-learning theory, optimization and statistical signal processing.

If you are interested in joining my group at UBC, Vancouver in Fall 2024, please apply to the UBC ECE graduate program and click here for more details. Check this to learn more about course offerings and exciting research activities on mathematics of information, learning and data from other groups within UBC.

Featured

Implicit Geometry of Next-token Prediction w/ Yize, Tina & Vala
Can we predict the geometry of athecontext and word representations of a Large Language Model based on the structure of the training data? We demonstrate this is possible—at least at a “macroscopic level”—in a doubly-asymptotic regime of sufficiently large models and extended training periods. Check out the preprints: (COLM24, arXIv)
ICASSP24 Tutotial on Fundamentals of Transformers w/ Mahdi, Ankit & Samet (slides)

News

Last updated (April 23)

[March 23] Congratulations to Vala and Puneesh for beeing awarded a 4-year-Fellowhsip for PhD studies at the ECE Department!
[March 23] New preprint on Stability and Generalization of Interpolating Neural Networks together with Hossein. Accepted at JMLR!
[February 23] Congratulations to Tina and Sadegh for beeing awarded a 4-year-Fellowhsip for PhD studies at the ECE Department!
[February 23] Implicit Geometry and Decentralized with Separable Data coming up at AISTATS
[December 22] Imbalance trouble at Neurips
[June 22] Invited talks at CWIT and Youth in High-Dimensions.
[November 21] Ke's paper Benign Overfitting in Binary Classification of Gaussian Mixtures accepted for publication at the SIAM Journal of Mathematics of Data Science.
[October 21] Congratulations to Ke, Sana, Ganesh, Orestis for their papers being accepted at NeurIPS 2021. Congratulations and many thanks to our great collaborators as well!
[September 21] New preprint with Kabir and Ashwin on Sharp global convergence guarantees for iterative non-convex optimization.
[August 21] New group members: Tina and Sadegh welcome!
[August 21] Invited talk at Stanford Stats.
[July 21] Our paper on Optimal combination of linear and spectral estimators for generalized linear models with Marco and Ramji published at FoCM!
[June 21] Awarded an NSERC Discovery Grant to partially fund our program for the next five years.
[June 21] Excited about our new preprint joint with Ke and Vidya on Benign Overfitting of Multiclass Classification !
[Mar 21] Invited talks at ETH, Harvard and UBC on the "Blessings and Curses of Overparameterization: A Precise High-dimensional Approach". Based on our recent works: here, here and here.
[Mar 21] New preprint on learning from imbalanced data under overparameterization, joint with Ganesh, Orestis and Samet.
[Jan 21] Congratulations to Hossein for his paper getting accepted at AISTATS 2021. Also, to Ganesh and Ke for their ICASSP papers.
[Jan 21] Hello beautiful Vancouver! Hello Canada! 🙂
[Dec 20] New paper on Provable Benefits of Overparameterization in Model Compression: From Double Descent to Pruning Neural Networks accepted at AAAI 2021.
[Dec 20] Congratulations to Sana for her paper Decentralized Multi-Agent Linear Bandits with Safety Constraints appearing at AAAI 21.
[Oct 20] New preprint on Asymptotic Behavior of Adversarial Training in Binary Classification joint with Hossein and Ramtin.
[Sep 20] Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2020!
[July 20] NSF funds our new project "Fundamental limits of empirical risk minimization in high-dimensions: A unifying Gaussian Processes approach"

Group

PhD: Hossein Taheri (co-advised), Ganesh R. Kini, Chen Fan (co-advised), H. Wenlong Deng (co-advised), Tina Behnia, Sadegh Mahdavi (co-advised)

MSc: Puneesh Deora, Vala Vakilian, Rouzbeh Ghaderi, Yize Zhao

Undergraduates: Tate McCartney

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Alumni: Ke Wang (PhD, 09/22) , Orestis Paraskevas (MSc, 04/22 - now at Goldman Sachs) , Sanae Amani (MSc, 12/20 - now PhD at UCLA), Will Van Hying (MSc, 07/20), Jaidev Gill (BSc, 06/24 - now PhD at UMichigan)

Research

Check my google scholar profile for up-to-date research publications.

Teaching

Current: Optimization (2022-2024) , Signals & Systems (2021-24)

Old: High-dimensional probability with applications to data science (UCSB 2019-20) , Estimation Theory (UCSB 2019-20), Introduction to Electrical Engineering (UCSB 2019-20)

Short (informal) Bio

I was born in Veroia, which is located in Macedonia, the northern part of Greece. However, I grew up in the south-west and specifically in the third largest city of Greece: Patras. I stayed in Patras for my undergraduate studies and I received the Diploma (5-years degree) in ECE from the University of Patras in 2011. During my undergraduate studies, I received invaluable advice and was particularly inspired by Professors George Moustakides, Dimitris Toumpakaris and George Bitsoris. In September 2011, I moved to California for my graduate studies. I received a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in EE in 2012 and 2016, respectively, both from Caltech, with a minor in Applied and Computational Mathematics. During these years, I was fortunate enough to have Prof. Babak Hassibi serving as my Ph.D. advisor. I also had the great opportunity to receive advice and guidance by the members of my Ph.D. committee Prof. Joel Tropp and Prof. P. P. Vaidyanathan. I spent the coming two years as a postdoctoral research associate at the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT, where I was generously supported by Prof. Gregory W. Wornell. In Fall 2018, it was time for me to return to the West Coast and the California sunshine in order to join the faculty at the ECE Department at UC, Santa Barbara. As much as I loved Santa Barbara, in January 2021, I started on a new adventure, moving to Vancouver, Canada, where I am now faculty at the ECE Department UBC.

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