Anay Mehrotra

Anay Mehrotra

anaymehrotra1@gmail.com

I am a Motwani Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford hosted by Amin Saberi. I completed my Ph.D. at Yale University where I was fortunate to be advised by Amin Karbasi and Manolis Zampetakis.

I study machine learning in settings where standard assumptions fail (especially with missing or selectively observed data) and the foundations and safety of Generative AI.

My work has received the Best Paper Award at COLT, been used for red-teaming production LLMs, and been featured in WIRED. I was also recognized as a Rising Star by TCS4All at STOC and at the Foundations of AI workshop jointly organized by the Universities of Oxford and Warwick.

Here is my Curriculum Vitae.

Recent News
Learning Theory in the Wild: Foundations of Missing Data and Language Generation

Ph.D. Thesis Yale University (2026)

Research Themes

Learning with Missing Data

What is learnable when data has missingness? And are existing methods enough for learning or do we need new approaches?

Related activity: Workshop at NeurIPS 2025 on Reliable ML from Unreliable Data

Algorithms for Language Models

How can algorithms help test the safety of LLMs and improve their reasoning abilities?

Impact: TAP, an automated red-teaming method, was used to safety-test Gemini 2.5 and MAI-Thinking-1 and was covered by WIRED.

Related activity:

Workshop at STOC 2026 on Understanding LLMs via a TCS Lens

Reading group on Rethinking Foundations of Real-world ML (REFORM) at Stanford

Foundations of Generative Models

What does successful generation mean? When can one learn to generate, and do we face any fundamental limitations?

  • Hallucination–mode-collapse tradeoffs (STOC 2025; FORC'26 Highlights), generation with bounded memory (SODA 2027), and contamination (COLT 2026)
  • Why diffusion models (DDPM) learn distributions so well?COLT 2026 (Best Short Paper at ICLR'25 workshop)

Related activity:

Tutorial at COLT 2025 on Language Generation

Workshop at Stanford on Language Generation

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Selected Awards

  • Rising Star, FAIRS at Warwick (2026)
  • Rising Star, TCS4All at STOC (2026)
  • Best Paper Award, COLT (2025)
  • Sri Binay Kumar Sinha Award, IIT Kanpur (2020)
  • Finalist, ICPC World Finals (Rank 33; 2020)
  • Winner, ICPC Asia West Continent Final (2019)
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Service

Co-organized