The CDS Monthly Research Feature

Artificial intelligence models are now capable of executing highly complex, research-level mathematics, signaling a fundamental shift in how scientists will approach future discoveries. CDS Silver Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Data Science Julia Kempe and her colleagues recently demonstrated this power by successfully using large language models to solve previously unpublished mathematical problems.

When humans are asked to pick a random number between one and one hundred, they offer a wide spread of choices, but when a large language model is asked the exact same question, it will almost always spit out the identical number (27!). CDS PhD student Anthony GX-Chen and his colleagues discovered the mathematical reason behind phenomena like this. Their work shows that “diversity loss” is a direct consequence of the model’s objective function.

For a decade, the Adam optimizer has overwhelmingly dominated as the way to train deep learning models. Recently, however, Adam is being threatened by the rise of different optimizers such as Muon. Work by CDS and Courant researchers explores this. “Hyperparameter Transfer Enables Consistent Gains of Matrix-Preconditioned Optimizers Across Scales” was authored by Courant PhD students Shikai Qiu and Zixi (Charlie) Chen, CDS PhD student Hoang Phan, CDS Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Data Science Qi Lei, and CDS Professor of Computer Science and Data Science Andrew Gordon Wilson.

Today is the last day to apply to The CDS Data Science Research Program for Undergraduate Students for Fall 2026! DSRPUGS is a year-long program in which students work on an assigned research project with distinguished data science faculty and researchers. Here are the four proposed projects for the upcoming academic year.

CDS invites proposals for a project for our Data Science MS students to work on during the Fall 2026 semester through our Capstone Project program. Selected from a highly competitive applicant pool, our students excel academically and have cutting-edge machine learning, NLP, and data analysis skills. Proposals are due August 2, 2026.

To learn more about our research, please visit the CDS Research Overview page.

Contact Email: cds-communications@nyu.edu

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