Sampling From Mean-Field Spin Glass Gibbs Measures
Abstract: I will discuss the questions of sampling and finding solutions of a prescribed energy in the mean-field p-spin Gibbs measure. Whether these tasks are efficiently possible is connected to the geometric properties of the measure, which undergoes a sequence of phase transition phenomena as the temperature is changed. I will present the phase diagram and discuss what is supposed to happen in each phase. I will present an efficient sampling algorithm in a large sub-interval of temperatures where this task is believed to be possible, and rule out a large sub-family of algorithms in the complement regime by showing that the Gibbs measure is chaotic in a certain sense.       

Bio: Ahmed El Alaoui joined the SDS faculty as an assistant professor in January 2021. He received his PhD in 2018 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, advised by Michael I. Jordan. He was afterwards a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, hosted by Andrea Montanari. His research interests revolve around high-dimensional phenomena in statistics and probability theory, statistical physics, algorithms, and problems where these areas meet.