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 correlation bounds, Boolean function analysis, and coding theory.

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

• Improved Circuit Lower Bounds With Applications to Exponential Separations Between Quantum and Classical Circuits
  Sabee Grewal, Vinayak M. Kumar
  Preprint
  (ECCC) (arXiv)
• 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)
• Relaxed Local Correctability from Local Testing
  Vinayak M. Kumar, Geoffrey Mon
  STOC 2024
  Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award
  Invited to the SICOMP Special Issue for STOC 2024
  (ECCC) (arXiv) (STOC Proceedings) (My STOC Talk) (Geoff's Simons Talk)
• Tight Correlation Bounds for Circuits Between AC0 and TC0
  Vinayak M. Kumar
  CCC 2023
  (ECCC) (arXiv) (CCC Proceedings)
• 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

• CS 395T: Pseudorandomness (Fall 2023)
• CS 388C: Combinatorics and Graph Theory (Spring 2023)

• CS 151: Complexity Theory (Spring 2021)
• CS 139: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Winter 2021)
• CS 38: Introduction to Algorithms (Spring 2020)
• CS 21: Complexity Theory (Winter 2020)
• Ma 0: Transition to Mathematical Proofs (Summer 2020)