School of Mathematical Sciences Academic Report [2025] No. 019

(High-Level University Construction Series Report No. 1042)

Lecture Title: Noise Stability: Old and New

Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Yu Lei (Nankai University)

Date & Time: 7:00–8:00 PM, March 26, 2025

Venue: Tencent Conference: 574-427-624

Abstract: Given a joint probability measure, the noise stability problem involves estimating the joint probability of a pair of sets (A,B) from their marginal probabilities. In the language of learning theory, when inferring one bit of information about a random variable Y from another variable X, this problem equivalently asks which bit carries the most information about Y. This talk surveys classical and recent advances in noise stability, including key conjectures such as the Mossel-O’Donnell conjecture (2005), Courtade-Kumar conjecture (2013), and Ordentlich-Polyanskiy-Shayevitz conjecture (2020), among others.

Biography: Dr. Yu Lei was selected for Nankai University’s "Hundred Young Academic Leaders Development Plan" in 2021 and currently serves as an Associate Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor in the School of Statistics and Data Science at Nankai University. He earned his Ph.D. in Electronic Information Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2015, followed by postdoctoral research at USTC, the National University of Singapore, and the University of California, Berkeley. His research lies at the intersection of information theory, probability theory, and combinatorics. He has published 25 papers in international journals such as Probability Theory and Related Fields、IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, received the China Institute of Electronics Young Star Award in Information Theory (2022), and has served as an Associate Editor for the top journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory since March 2024.

All faculty and students are welcome to attend!

Invited by: Lu Jian

School of Mathematical Sciences

March 26, 2025