About Me
About Me
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Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
UC Berkeley
I am a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, hosted by Michael I. Jordan. Previously, I was a PhD student at ETH Zurich in Florian Dörfler's research group. My current research lies at the intersection of optimization, statistics, and computation, addressing the challenges of optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This includes complex forms of uncertainty such as distribution shifts, rare events (black swans), and graph-structured uncertainty. My theoretical work generally draws inspiration from fundamental engineering challenges in machine learning, energy markets, and transportation networks, where uncertainty plays a key role in decision-making and system resilience. My PhD work mainly focused on developing the foundations of distributionally robust optimization, with applications in high-dimensional estimation, automatic control, and energy markets. Earlier in my PhD, I worked on the stability and robustness of nonlinear systems, with applications to renewable-integrated power systems.
Research Interests
Research Interests
(1) Stochastic Optimization; (2) Robust Optimization; (3) Sequential Anytime-Valid Inference; (4) Uncertainty Quantification for AI
Most Recent Three Papers (Under Review)
Most Recent Three Papers (Under Review)
[1] “Stopping Rules for Stochastic Gradient Descent via Anytime-Valid Confidence Sequences”. Under Review in Mathematics of Operations Research. ArXiv version: arxiv:2512.13123 (2026). With Michael I. Jordan.
[2] “Diffusion-Robust Optimization over Graphs”. Under Review in Mathematics of Operations Research. ArXiv version: arxiv:2605.30853 (2026). With Ricky Huang, Paul Grigas, Michael I. Jordan.
[3] “Stochastic Optimization with Optimal Importance Sampling”. Under Review in Mathematics of Operations Research. ArXiv version: arxiv:2504.03560 (2025). With B. Van Parys, H. Lam, M.I. Jordan.
Selected Papers (Accepted or Major Revision)
Selected Papers (Accepted or Major Revision)
[1] “Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Estimation in High Dimensions: Performance Analysis and Optimal Hyperparameter Tuning”. Accepted in Mathematical Programming (Series A). ArXiv version: arxiv:2206.13269 (2025). With S. Shafiee, F. Dörfler.
[2] “Nash Equilibria, Regularization and Computation in Optimal Transport-Based Distributionally Robust Optimization”. Accepted in Operations Research. ArXiv version: arXiv:2303.03900 (2025). With S. Shafiee, F. Dörfler, D. Kuhn.
[3] “Revisiting mean estimation over ℓp balls: Is the MLE optimal?”. Major Revision in The Annals of Statistics. ArXiv version: arxiv:2506.10354 (2025). With M.I. Jordan, R. Pathak, A. Ulichney.
[4] “Minimum Volume Conformal Sets for Multivariate Regression”. Accepted in Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory and Methods). ArXiv version: arxiv:2503.19068. With S. Braun, M.I. Jordan, F. Bach.
[5] “Conformal Prediction under Levy-Prokhorov Distribution Shifts: Robustness to Local and Global Perturbations". Accepted in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2025). ArXiv version: arxiv:2502.14105. With Z.O. Wang, J. Zhu, M.I. Jordan, Y. Marzouk.
[6] “Distributional Uncertainty Propagation via Optimal Transport”. Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. ArXiv version: arxiv:2205.00343. With N. Lanzetti, H. Chen, F. Dörfler.
Contact: liviu.aolaritei@berkeley.edu
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