Prof. Volkan Cevher

Research Interests:

  • Machine Learning
  • Optimization
  • Signal Processing
  • Information Theory

Biography

Volkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park, from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. He was also a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University from 2010-2020. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and an Amazon Scholar. His research interests include machine learning, optimization theory and methods, and automated control. Dr. Cevher is an IEEE Fellow (’24), an ELLIS fellow, and was the recipient of the ICML AdvML Best Paper Award in 2023, Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.

Publications (most recent)

On the Role of Batch Size in Stochastic Conditional Gradient Methods

R. Islamov; R. Machacek; A. Lucchi; A. Silveti-Falls; E. Gorbunov et al. 

2026. 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), Seoul, South Korea, 2026-07-06 – 2026-07-11.

Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

L. Viano; T. Freihaut; E. Nevali; V. Cevher; M. Geist et al. 

2026. 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), Seoul, South Korea, 2026-07-06 – 2026-07-11.

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

L. Candogan; A. Afzal; P. Puigdemont; V. Cevher 

2026. 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), Seoul, South Korea, 2026-07-06 – 2026-07-11.

Training Neural Networks at Any Scale: An exposition

T. Pethick; K. Antonakopoulos; A. Silveti-Falls; L. C. Vankadara; V. Cevher 

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. 2026. Vol. 43, num. 3, p. 21 – 36. DOI : 10.1109/msp.2026.3667310.

Sequence Modeling Architectures: Foundations [Special Issue on the Mathematics of Deep Learning]

F. Sarnthein; A. Afzal; R. Pascanu; A. Orvieto; C. Gulcehre et al. 

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. 2026. Vol. 43, num. 3, p. 115 – 129. DOI : 10.1109/msp.2026.3682808.

Convergence to Equilibrium of No-Regret Dynamics in Congestion Games

V. Cevher; W. Chen; L. Dadi; J. Dong; I. Panageas et al. 

2026. 20th International Conference on Web and Internet Economics, Edinburgh, UK, 2024-12-02 – 2024-12-05. p. 513 – 529. DOI : 10.1007/978-3-032-08560-3_29.

ESLM: Risk-Averse Selective Language Modeling with Hierarchical Batch Selection

M. I. Bal; V. Cevher; M. Muehlebach 

Transactions on Machine Learning Research. 2026. Vol. 2026-August.

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

J. Fu; Y. Wu; Y. Chen; K. Peng; X. Zhang et al. 

Transactions on Machine Learning Research. 2026. Vol. 2026-June.

Optimization in Modern Machine Learning: Steepest Descent Theory and Trustworthy Models

Y. Wu / V. Cevher (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Theoretical Studies of Learning in Overparameterized Neural Networks

Z. Zhu / V. Cevher (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Reward is not enough: Advances in reinforcement learning fromdemonstrations and preferences

L. Viano / V. Cevher (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Noisy Gradient Descent in Machine Learning: generalization, games, and sampling

L. T. Dadi / V. Cevher (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Character-level Adversarial Robustness in Natural Language Processing

E. Abad Rocamora / V. Cevher (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Stable Optimization in Deep Learning: Geometry and Games

T. M. Pethick / V. Cevher (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Scalable Neurotherapies with Bayesian Optimization and Beyond

P. Abranches Figueiredo Simoes De Carvalho / V. Cevher; G. Courtine (Dir.)  

Lausanne, EPFL, 2026. 

Generalized Gradient Norm Clipping & Non-Euclidean (L 0 , L 1 )-Smoothness

T. Pethick; W. Xie; M. Erdogan; K. Antonakopoulos; A. Silveti-Falls et al. 

2025. 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, San Diego, USA, 2025-12-02 – 2025-12-07. p. 23988 – 24026. DOI : 10.52202/085713-0714.

Robustness in Both Domains: CLIP Needs a Robust Text Encoder

E. Abad Rocamora; C. Schlarmann; N. Singh; Y. Wu; M. Hein et al. 

2025. 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), San Diego, USA, 2025-12-02 – 2025-12-07.

Linear Attention for Efficient Bidirectional Sequence Modeling

A. Afzal; E. Abad Rocamora; L. Candogan; P. Puigdemont; F. Tonin et al. 

2025. 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), San Diego, USA, 2025-12-02 – 2025-12-07.

Ascent Fails to Forget

I. Mavrothalassitis; P. Puigdemont; N. I. Levi; V. Cevher 

2025. 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), San Diego, USA, 2025-12-02 – 2025-12-07.

Multi-Step Alignment as Markov Games: An Optimistic Online Mirror Descent Approach with Convergence Guarantees

Y. Wu; L. Viano; K. Antonakopoulos; Y. Chen; Z. Zhu et al. 

Transactions on Machine Learning Research. 2025. num. 12/2025.

Contact

e-mail address: Volkan Cevher


telephone: +41 21 6930111


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