Symposium for Undergraduate Mathematics Research
Symposium for Undergraduate Mathematics Research
(SUMR)
(SUMR)
SUNY New Paltz,
Saturday, September 19th, 2026
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Registration is open!
▶️Click here◀️
Please register by Sep. 9th
Contact Cheyne Glass (glassc@newpaltz.edu) with any questions, interest in giving a talk, or recommendations for keynote speaker(s).
A schedule with abstracts will be posted here closer to the event.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Justin Curry, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University at Albany
(expand for title&abstract)
Title: Deep Reinforcement Learning via Stratified Geometry
Abstract: As AI continues to expand its capabilities, it is natural to want to understand how these technologies work. Most researchers agree that what makes things like transformers—the T in ChatGPT—so capable is that they learn hidden “latent” geometric structure underlying massive data sets, such as human-generated text. In this talk, I am going to show that when transformers are trained to play simple video games, then the geometry that the transformer uses to reason is stratified—meaning that it consists of manifolds of varying dimension glued together. This provides a soft correction to the so-called “manifold hypotheses” used by machine learning researchers and points to the need for more sophisticated tools for mechanistic interpretability.
Directions:
All activities will take place at Science Hall at the northeast corner of campus.
SUNY New Paltz campus: -Directions- , -Interactive Map- , -Printable Map-
Guidelines for presentation:
Undergraduate students interested in presenting their research who register accordingly will be notified on a week before the event. The registration deadline for presentation will be approximately two weeks before the event.
Each presentation should devote 15 minutes to research, concluding with an additional 5 minutes to answer the following questions about the research experience:
Where was your research conducted?
What was the application process like?
With whom was your research conducted? How did this selection occur?
What was the day-to-day research experience like? Did it change over the summer?
What was the hardest thing about your research experience?
What surprised you the most about your research experience?
What did you enjoy the most about your research experience?
What did you enjoy the most about related experiences outside of research?
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