Statistical Foundations of Latent Structure and Representation Learning
November 4–5, 2026
Columbia University New York City
About
Modern statistical and machine learning problems increasingly rely on uncovering latent structure and learning informative representations from complex, high-dimensional data. Fundamental questions concerning identifiability, statistical efficiency, uncertainty quantification, computation, causality, and interpretability arise across latent variable models, high-dimensional statistics, networks, and modern representation learning.
This two-day workshop brings together researchers from statistics, machine learning, data science, and related fields to discuss recent advances and emerging connections in the statistical foundations of latent structure and representation learning.
Speakers

Florentina Bunea
Cornell University

Tianxi Cai
Harvard University

Yuxin Chen
University of Pennsylvania

David Dunson
Duke University

Jianqing Fan
Princeton University

Biwei Huang
UC San Diego

Jiashun Jin
Carnegie Mellon University

George Michailidis
UCLA

Carey Priebe
Johns Hopkins University

Annie Qu
UC Santa Barbara

Veronika Rockova
University of Chicago

Gongjun Xu
University of Michigan

Bin Yu
UC Berkeley

Kun Zhang
Carnegie Mellon University

Ji Zhu
University of Michigan

Hui Zou
Johns Hopkins University
Program
Program forthcoming.
The detailed program and talk titles will be posted closer to the workshop.
Location
Columbia University, New York City.
The exact venue and logistical details will be posted here when finalized.
Organizer
Yuqi Gu
Department of Statistics, Columbia University
Questions about the workshop: yuqi.gu@columbia.edu