Hi there! I’m Sam, a PhD candidate in the Theory of Computation Group at Columbia University, where I am extremely fortunate to be advised by Daniel Hsu and Jeannette Wing. My broad research areas are: algorithmic statistics, machine learning theory, and online learning.

A bit more specifically, my research focuses on statistical learning in settings where the training and test distributions differ: this might arise, for instance, from distribution shift or demand for a more fine-grained notion of accuracy on subgroups. I also like thinking about online learning, sequential decision-making, and all the cool theory that comes out of it.

I’m grateful to have my research supported by the Avanessians Doctoral Fellowship for Engineering Thought Leaders and Innovators in Data Science.

In the Fall of 2024, I’m a visiting student at the Simons program on Modern Paradigms of Generalization. If you’re at Berkeley or at the program, I would love to chat about research or whatever else!

Research

Group-wise oracle-efficient algorithms for online multi-group learning
Samuel Deng, Daniel Hsu, and Jingwen Liu.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

Multi-group Learning for Hierarchical Groups
Samuel Deng and Daniel Hsu.
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.

Learning Tensor Representations for Meta-Learning.
Samuel Deng, Yilin Guo, Daniel Hsu, Debmalya Mandal.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2022.

A Separation Result Between Data-oblivious and Data-aware Poisoning Attacks.
Samuel Deng, Sanjam Garg, Somesh Jha, Saeed Mahloujifar, Mohammad Mahmoody, Abhradeep Thakurta.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.

An Attack on InstaHide: Is Private Learning Possible with Instance Encoding?
Nicholas Carlini, Samuel Deng, Sanjam Garg, Somesh Jha, Saeed Mahloujifar, Mohammad Mahmoody, Shuang Song, Abhradeep Thakurta, Florian Tramèr.
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), 2021.

Ensuring Fairness Beyond the Training Data.
Debmalya Mandal, Samuel Deng, Suman Jana, Jeannette Wing, Daniel Hsu.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020.

Biased Programmers? Or Biased Data? A Field Experiment on Operationalizing AI Ethics.
Bo Cowgill, Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, Samuel Deng, Daniel Hsu, Nakul Verma, Augustin Chaintreau.
21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 2020.

Methodological Blind Spots in Machine Learning Fairness: Lessons from the Philosophy of Science and Computer Science
Samuel Deng, Achille Varzi.
NeurIPS Workshop on Human-Centric Machine Learning, 2019.
Undergraduate Senior Thesis, 2019. full pdf

Teaching

I really love teaching, and I am passionate about developing my own pedagogical practices. In particular, it’s important to me to think about ways in which pedagogy in computer science and math education could be improved to be more effective, empathetic, and equitable to diverse student needs.

In Summer 2024, I created and taught Mathematics for Machine Learning from scratch, a bridge course for Columbia CS students to strengthen mathematical foundations for studying machine learning. See the link for the course materials, which are all public. Here’s a bit on why I made this course (tldr: when I took machine learning, I had no idea what an expectation was).

On the teaching front, I’ve also had the pleasure of:

• Participating in Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Teaching Development Program, a multiyear certification program for students to cultivate, document, and reflect on the development of their teaching throughout their Ph.D.
• Serving as Head TA for Daniel Hsu’s Computational Linear Algebra, Fall 2022. (course webpage) Delivered a guest lecture on eigenvectors and eigenvalues as part of an observation for CTL’s Foundation Track program (12/01/2022).
• Serving as an Instructor for Christos Papadimitriou and John Morrison’s Natural and Artificial Neural Networks Lab, Spring 2022. My co-instructor, Clayton Sanford, and I designed the 1-credit lab from scratch: all materials are available here.
• Serving as a Teaching Assistant Fellow during my M.S. for Machine Learning and Discrete Mathematics, where I was awarded the Andrew P. Kosoresow Award for Excellence in Teaching.
• Serving as a TA for Machine Learning and Discrete Mathematics as an undergraduate at Columbia.

Service

Alongside Hadleigh Schwartz, I am currently Ph.D coordinator for Columbia’s Emerging Scholars Program (ESP), a peer-taught, discussion-based seminar course for first and second-year CS students focused on group problem-solving, collaboration, and introducing beginning computer scientists to the breadth of the subject.

Other responsibilities have included:

• Conference reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025.

Miscellaneous

I also like long-distance running, nerding out about books and movies, and a good burrito.