Vinayak M. Kumar
Hello! I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in UT Austin's Computer Science Theory group, fortunate to be advised by David Zuckerman. I am interested in combinatorial and probabilistic problems in pseudorandomenss, like hashing, coding theory, and circuit lower bounds.
Before joining UT Austin in 2021,
I received my B.S. in mathematics and computer science at Caltech. I'm extremely grateful to have been mentored by Venkatesan Guruswami and Leonard Schulman during my undergraduate years.
Publications & Preprints
- New Pseudorandom Generators and Correlation Bounds Using Extractors
Vinayak M. Kumar
ITCS 2025 (to appear)
- Improved Circuit Lower Bounds and Quantum-Classical Separations
Sabee Grewal, Vinayak M. Kumar
Preprint (ECCC) (arXiv)
- Relaxed Local Correctability from Local Testing
Vinayak M. Kumar, Geoffrey Mon
STOC 2024 (ECCC) (arXiv) (STOC Proceedings) (My STOC Talk) (Geoff's Simons Talk)
Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award
Invited to the SICOMP Special Issue for STOC 2024
- Tight Correlation Bounds for Circuits Between AC0 and TC0
Vinayak M. Kumar
CCC 2023 (ECCC) (arXiv) (CCC Proceedings)
- On the Rational Degree of Boolean Functions and Applications
Vishnu Iyer, Siddhartha Jain, Matt Kovacs-Deak, Vinayak M. Kumar, Luke Schaeffer, Daochen Wang, Michael Whitmeyer
Preprint (arXiv)
- Pseudobinomiality of the Sticky Random Walk
Venkatesan Guruswami, Vinayak M. Kumar
ITCS 2021 (ECCC) (ITCS Proceedings) (My ITCS Talk)
- Condition Number Bounds for Causal Inference
Spencer Gordon, Vinayak M. Kumar, Leonard Schulman, Piyush Srivastava
UAI 2021 (UAI Proceedings) (Piyush's Simons Talk)
Teaching
I served as a TA for the following course at UT Austin:
and for the following courses at Caltech: