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Treelike Asymptotic Dynamics for Iterative Algorithms and Random Matrices

Probability

Speaker: Chris Jones, UC Davis
Related Webpage: https://chrisjones.space/
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Thu, Oct 30 2025, 11:00AM

The traffic distribution of an n-by-n matrix is a generalization of its spectral distribution which captures the values of all S_n-symmetric polynomial functions of the matrix. Therefore, the traffic distribution describes the universality class of all S_n-equivariant algorithms running on the matrix, including first-order iterative algorithms such as Approximate Message Passing and gradient descent-type optimization. We study random matrix ensembles and prove that only "treelike" polynomials are non-negligible in many cases, leading to a new Treelike Approximate Message Passing algorithm. We then show that some deterministic pseudorandom matrices such as the Walsh--Hadamard matrix also have the treelike property, obtaining the first computation of the traffic distribution for a nontrivial deterministic matrix and hence the first universality result for this class of algorithms with a deterministic input. This is based on joint work with Nicola Gorini, Tim Kunisky, and Lucas Pesenti.