December 14-17, 2025

Sydney, Australia

Program Schedule

All the times are in AEDT (UTC +11). Additional (social) activities are or will be listed on the corresponding page: fun runs, walks, etc.

Day 1: Sunday, December 14, 2025

The planned events on Day 1 include Workshops and a Welcome Reception. 

Workshop Session A
(Blackwattle 1)

Workshop Session B
(Blackwattle 2)

Workshop Session C
(Blackwattle 3)

8:30–9:00

Welcome tea and registration ☕

 9:00–10:00 Breaking and Making Quantum Speedups (organized by Siddhartha Jain, Seyoon Ragavan, Alexander Schmidhuber, and Noah Shutty)
Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: Bridging Theoretical Foundations and Industrial Frontiers
(organized by Piotr Indyk, Rajesh Jayaram, and Ravi Krishnaswamy)
Space: Connecting Classical and Catalytic Approaches
(organized by Ian Mertz and Ted Pyne )
10:00–10:30

Break ☕

 10:30–12:00 Breaking and Making Quantum Speedups (organized by Siddhartha Jain, Seyoon Ragavan, Alexander Schmidhuber, and Noah Shutty)
Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: Bridging Theoretical Foundations and Industrial Frontiers
(organized by Piotr Indyk, Rajesh Jayaram, and Ravi Krishnaswamy)
Space: Connecting Classical and Catalytic Approaches
(organized by Ian Mertz and Ted Pyne )
12:001:30

Lunch (provided) 🍽️

1:30–3:00 Breaking and Making Quantum Speedups (organized by Siddhartha Jain, Seyoon Ragavan, Alexander Schmidhuber, and Noah Shutty)
Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: Bridging Theoretical Foundations and Industrial Frontiers
(organized by Piotr Indyk, Rajesh Jayaram, and Ravi Krishnaswamy)
The Localization Method for High-dimensional Inequalities
(organized by Santosh S. Vempala)
3:00–3:30

Break

 3:30–4:30 Breaking and Making Quantum Speedups (organized by Siddhartha Jain, Seyoon Ragavan, Alexander Schmidhuber, and Noah Shutty)
Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: Bridging Theoretical Foundations and Industrial Frontiers
(organized by Piotr Indyk, Rajesh Jayaram, and Ravi Krishnaswamy)
The Localization Method for High-dimensional Inequalities
(organized by Santosh S. Vempala)
4:30–4:45

Break

4:45–5:30

Graduating bits 🎓

6:008:00

Welcome Reception 🥂

Day 2: Monday, December 15, 2025

 9:00–10:30

Session 1A

(Blackwattle 1)

Session 1B

(Blackwattle 2)

Session 1C

(Blackwattle 3)

 Online Edge Coloring: Sharp Thresholds
Authors: J. Blikstad, O. Svensson, R. Vintan, D. Wajc
Integer multiplication is at least as hard as matrix transposition
Authors: D. Harvey, J. van der Hoeven
Group Order is in QCMA
Authors: F. Le Gall, H. Nishimura, D. Thakkar
 Edge-weighted Matching in the Dark
Authors: Z. Huang, E. Sun, X. Wu, J. Zhao
Computing the Polytope Diameter is Even Harder than NP-hard (Already for Perfect Matchings)
Author: L. Wulf
Exponential improvements to the average-case hardness of BosonSampling
Authors: A. Bouland, S. Datta, B. Fefferman, F. Hernandez
 Integral Online Algorithms for Set Cover and Load Balancing with Convex Objectives
Authors: T. Kesselheim, M. Molinaro, K. Patton, S. Singla
Asymptotically Optimal Inapproximability of E$k$-SAT Reconfiguration
Authors: S. Hirahara, N. Ohsaka
RE-completeness of entangled constraint satisfaction problems
Authors: E. Culf, K. Mastel
 Optimal 4-Approximation for the Correlated Pandora’s Problem
Authors: N. Bansal, Z. Huang, Z. Zhu
Ineffectiveness for Search and Undecidability of PCSP Meta-Problems
Author: A. Larrauri
Gap-preserving reductions and RE-completeness of Independent Set Games
Authors: L. Mančinska, P. Spaas, T. Spirig, M. Vernooij
 A Little Clairvoyance Is All You Need
Authors: A. Gupta, H. Kaplan, A. Lindermayr, J. Schlöter, S. Yingchareonthawornchai
Inapproximability of Finding Sparse Vectors in Codes, Subspaces, and Lattices
Authors: V. Bhattiprolu, V. Guruswami, E. Lee, X. Ren
Incompressibility and spectral gaps of random circuits
Authors: C. Chen, J. Haah, J. Haferkamp, Y. Liu, T. Metger, X. Tan
10:30–10:50

Break ☕

10:50–12:02

Session 2A

(Blackwattle 1)

Session 2B

(Blackwattle 2)

Session 2C

(Blackwattle 3)

 Weighted k-Path and Other Problems in Almost O*(2^k) Deterministic Time via Dynamic Representative Sets
Author: J. Nederlof
Structural properties of the factorization norm
Authors: I. Balla, L. Hambardzumyan, I. Tomon
The Sponge is Quantum Indifferentiable
Authors: G. Alagic, J. Carolan, C. Majenz, S. Tokat
 Improved 2-Approximate Shortest Paths for close vertex pairs
Author: M. Gupta
More efficient sifting for grid norms, and applications to multiparty communication complexity
Authors: Z. Kelley, X. Lyu
Parallel Repetition for Post-Quantum Arguments
Authors: A. Huang, Y. Kalai
 Paths and Intersections: Exact Emulators for Planar Graphs
Authors: G. Li, Z. Tan, T. Zhang
Sign-Rank of k-Hamming Distance is Constant
Authors: M. Göös, N. Harms, V. Imbach, D. Sokolov
On the Impossibility of SNARGs with Short CRS (or: Revisiting Gentry-Wichs Barrier in the Non-adaptive Setting)
Authors: L. Chen, Z. Jin
 Distance Approximating Minors for Planar and Minor-Free Graphs
Authors: H. Chang, J. Conroy
Direct Product Theorems for Randomized Query Complexity
Authors: S. Ben-David, E. Blais
On Succinct Obfuscation via Propositional Logic (or: How to use pv-IO)
Authors: A. Jain, Z. Jin, S. Mathialagan, O. Paneth
12:021:30

Lunch (provided) 🍽️

1:30–2:30

Plenary 1

Shafi Goldwasser, MIT

2:30–3:00

Break

3:00–4:12

Session 3A

(Blackwattle 1)

Session 3B

(Blackwattle 2)

Session 3C

(Blackwattle 3)

 An Improved Greedy Approximation for (Metric) $k$-Means
Authors: M. Charikar, V. Cohen-Addad, R. Gao, F. Grandoni, E. Lee, E. van Wijland
Deterministic factorization of constant-depth algebraic circuits in subexponential time
Authors: S. Bhattacharjee, M. Kumar, V. Ramanathan, R. Saptharishi, S. Saraf
Cryptography meets worst-case complexity: Optimal security and more from iO and worst-case assumptions
Authors: R. Ilango, A. Lombardi
 Stochastic Knapsack without Relaxing the Capacity
Authors: A. De, S. Khanna, N. White
Rank Bounds and PIT for $\Sigma^3 \Pi \Sigma \Pi^d$ circuits via a non-linear Edelstein-Kelly theorem
Authors: A. Garg, R. Oliveira, A. Sengupta
Solving Linear Inequalities over Convex Sets & its Applications to Cryptography and Hydrodynamics
Authors: S. Basu, H. Khorasgani, H. Maji, H. Nguyen
 Adaptivity Gaps for Stochastic Probing with Subadditive Functions
Authors: J. Li, Y. Liu, Y. Zhang
Kronecker Powers, Orthogonal Vectors, and the Asymptotic Spectrum
Authors: J. Alman, B. Li
Binary Codes for Computationally Bounded Errors Under Standard Crypto Assumptions
Authors: G. Lu, J. Silbak, D. Wichs
 Stochastic scheduling with Bernoulli-type jobs through policy stratification
Authors: A. Antoniadis, R. Hoeksma, K. Schewior, M. Uetz
Complexity theory of orbit closure intersection for tensors: reductions, completeness, and graph isomorphism hardness
Authors: V. Lysikov, M. Walter
Succinct Homomorphic MACs from Groups and Applications
Authors: Y. Ishai, H. Li, H. Lin
4:12–4:30

Break

4:30–5:24

Session 4A

(Blackwattle 1)

Session 4B

(Blackwattle 2)

Session 4C

(Blackwattle 3)

 Faster Mixing of the Jerrum-Sinclair Chain
Authors: X. Chen, W. Feng, Z. Ju, T. Miao, Y. Yin, X. Zhang
Bipartite Matching is in Catalytic Logspace
Authors: A. Agarwala, I. Mertz
A distillation–teleportation protocol for fault-tolerant QRAM
Authors: A. Dalzell, C. Hann, A. Gilyén, S. McArdle, G. Salton, Q. Nguyen, A. Kubica, F. Brandao
 Rapid Mixing on Random Regular Graphs beyond Uniqueness
Authors: X. Chen, Z. Chen, Z. Chen, Y. Yin, X. Zhang
Collapsing Catalytic Classes
Authors: M. Koucky, I. Mertz, E. Pyne, S. Sami
Adversarially robust quantum state learning and testing
Authors: M. Aliakbarpour, V. Braverman, N. Chia, Y. Liu
 Deterministic counting from coupling independence
Authors: X. Chen, W. Feng, H. Guo, X. Zhang, Z. Zou
Shuffling Cards When You Are of Very Little Brain: Low Memory Generation of Permutations
Authors: M. Naor, B. Menuhin
Learning quantum Gibbs states locally and efficiently
Authors: C. Chen, A. Anshu, Q. Nguyen
5:24–6:00

Break

6:007:30

Business meeting 📊

Day 3: Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 9:00–10:30

Session 5A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 5B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 5C (Blackwattle 3)

Near-Optimal Fault-Tolerant Strong Connectivity Preservers
Authors: G. Hoppenworth, T. Saranurak, B. Wang
Random Reed-Solomon Codes and Random Linear Codes are Locally Equivalent
Authors: M. Levi, J. Mosheiff, N. Shagrithaya
Characterization of Priority-Neutral Matching Lattices
Authors: C. Thomas
Deterministic Almost-Linear-Time Gomory-Hu Trees
Authors: A. Abboud, R. Kyng, J. Li, D. Panigrahi, M. Probst, T. Saranurak, W. Yuan, W. Yuan
Maximally Extendable Product Codes are Good Coboundary Expanders
Authors: G. Kalachev, P. Panteleev
Truthful and Almost Envy-Free Mechanism of Allocating Indivisible Goods: the Power of Randomness
Authors: X. Bu, B. Tao
Combinatorial Maximum Flow via Weighted Push-Relabel on Shortcut Graphs
Authors: A. Bernstein, J. Blikstad, J. Li, T. Saranurak, T. Tu
Near-Asymptotically-Good Quantum Codes with Transversal CCZ Gates and Sublinear-Weight Parity-Checks
Authors: L. Golowich, V. Guruswami
Beyond Regularity: Simple versus Optimal Mechanisms, Revisited
Authors: Y. Feng, Y. Jin
Generalized Flow in Nearly-linear Time on Moderately Dense Graphs
Authors: S. Jiang, M. Kapralov, L. Er Lu, A. Sidford
A k^{q/q-2} Lower Bound for Odd Query Locally Decodable Codes from Bipartite Kikuchi Graphs
Authors: O. Janzer, P. Manohar
Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes via Utility Alignment: Unit-Demand Pricing and More
Authors: R. Bowers, M. Garbea, E. Pountourakis, S. Taggart
Almost Tight Additive Guarantees for $k$-Edge-Connectivity
Authors: N. Kumar, C. Swamy
Improved Lower Bounds for all Odd-Query Locally Decodable Codes
Authors: A. Basu, J. Hsieh, P. Kothari, A. Lin
Nearly Tight Regret Bounds for Profit Maximization in Bilateral Trade
Authors: S. Di Gregorio, P. Duetting, F. Fusco, C. Schwiegelshohn
10:30–10:50

Break ☕

10:50–12:02

Session 6A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 6B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 6C (Blackwattle 3)

The Power of Recursive Embeddings for $\ell_p$ Metrics
Authors: R. Krauthgamer, N. Petruschka, S. Sapir
Undirected Multicast Network Coding Gaps via Locally Decodable Codes
Authors: Z. He, M. Braverman
How Global Calibration Strengthens Multiaccuracy
Authors: S. Casacuberta, P. Gopalan, V. Kanade, O. Reingold
Embeddings into Similarity Measures for Nearest Neighbor Search
Authors: A. Andoni, N. Nosatzki
Constant Rate Codes for Adaptive Broadcasts Do Not Exist
Authors: K. Efremenko, G. Kol, D. Paramonov, R. Saxena
High dimensional online calibration in polynomial time
Authors: B. Peng
Average-Distortion Sketching
Authors: Y. Bao, A. Baweja, N. Menand, E. Waingarten, N. White, T. Zhang
List Decoding Expander-Based Codes up to Capacity in Near-Linear Time
Authors: S. Srivastava, M. Tulsiani
Near-Optimal Algorithms for Omniprediction
Authors: P. Okoroafor, B. Kleinberg, M. Kim
Query-Efficient Fixpoints of $\ell_p$-Contractions
Authors: S. Haslebacher, J. Lill, P. Schnider, S. Weber
Robust Local Testability of Tensor Products of Constant-Rate Algebraic Geometry Codes
Authors: S. Garg, A. Sengupta
Density Measures for Language Generation
Authors: J. Kleinberg, F. Wei
12:021:30

Lunch (provided) 🍽️

1:30–2:40

Plenary 2

Sebastien Bubeck (OpenAI)

2:40–3:10

Break

3:10–4:22

Session 7A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 7B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 7C (Blackwattle 3)

Approximating High-Dimensional Earth Mover’s Distance as Fast as Closest Pair
Authors: L. Beretta, V. Cohen-Addad, R. Jayaram, E. Waingarten
Fingerprint Filters are Optimal
Authors: W. Kuszmaul, J. Liang, R. Zhou
Overcomplete Tensor Decomposition via Koszul-Young Flattenings
Authors: P. Kothari, A. Moitra, A. Wein
Root Ridge Leverage Score Sampling for $\ell_p$ Subspace Approximation
Authors: D. Woodruff, T. Yasuda
Static Retrieval Revisited: To Optimality and Beyond
Authors: Y. Hu, W. Kuszmaul, J. Liang, H. Yu, J. Zhang, R. Zhou
Implicit High-Order Moment Tensor Estimation and Learning Latent Variable Models
Authors: I. Diakonikolas, D. Kane
Perfect L_p Sampling with Polylogarithmic Update Time
Authors: W. Swartworth, D. Woodruff, S. Zhou
Stronger Cell Probe Lower Bounds via Local PRGs
Authors: O. Korten, T. Pitassi, R. Impagliazzo
Robust Learning of Multi-index Models via Iterative Subspace Approximation
Authors: I. Diakonikolas, G. Iakovidis, D. Kane, N. Zarifis
ℓ2/ℓ2 Sparse Recovery via Weighted Hypergraph Peeling
Authors: N. Fischer, V. Nakos
Pattern Matching under Weighted Edit Distance
Authors: P. Charalampopoulos, T. Kociumaka, P. Wellnitz
Solving Zero-Sum Games with Fewer Matrix-Vector Products
Authors: I. Karmarkar, L. O’Carroll, A. Sidford
4:22–4:40

Break

4:40–5:34

Session 8A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 8B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 8C (Blackwattle 3)

Fast Algorithms for Graph Arboricity and Related Problems
Authors: R. Cen, H. Fleischmann, G. Li, J. Li, D. Panigrahi
Ramanujan bigraphs and applications
Authors: S. Evra, B. Feigon, O. Parzanchevski, K. Maurischat
Faster exact learning of k-term DNFs with membership and equivalence queries
Authors: J. Alman, S. Nadimpalli, S. Patel, R. Servedio
Dynamic Treewidth in Logarithmic Time
Author: T. Korhonen
Extractors for Samplable Distributions with Polynomially Small Min-Entropy
Authors: R. Shaltiel
Computational-Statistical Tradeoffs from NP-hardness
Authors: G. Blanc, C. Koch, C. Strassle, L. Tan
Random-Shift Revisited: Tight Approximations for Tree Embeddings and ℓ1-Oblivious Routings
Authors: M. Probst, R. Kyng, T. Rieder
Finding Colorings in One-Sided Expanders
Authors: R. Buhai, Y. Hua, D. Steurer, A. Vári-Kakas
Theoretical limitations of multi-layer Transformer
Authors: L. Chen, B. Peng, H. Wu
5:24–6:00

Break

6:009:00

Banquet @ Squire Landing 🍴🍷

Day 4: Wednesday, December 17, 2025

 9:00–10:30

Session 9A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 9B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 9C (Blackwattle 3)

Towards True Work-Efficiency in Parallel Derandomization: MIS, Maximal Matching, and Hitting Set
Authors: M. Ghaffari, C. Grunau
On Inverse Theorems and Combinatorial Lines
Authors: A. Bhangale, S. Khot, Y. Liu, D. Minzer
Characterization of Priority-Neutral Matching Lattices
Authors: C. Thomas
Parallel $(1+\epsilon)$-Approximate Multi-Commodity Mincost Flow in Almost Optimal Depth and Work
Authors: B. Haeupler, Y. Jiang, Y. Long, T. Saranurak, S. Wang
NP-hardness of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem from Well-Studied Assumptions
Authors: S. Hirahara, R. Ilango
Truthful and Almost Envy-Free Mechanism of Allocating Indivisible Goods: the Power of Randomness
Authors: X. Bu, B. Tao
On the Parallel Complexity of Finding a Matroid Basis
Authors: S. Khanna, A. Putterman, J. Song
The Proof Analysis Problem
Authors: N. Arteche, A. Atserias, S. de Rezende, E. Khaniki
Beyond Regularity: Simple versus Optimal Mechanisms, Revisited
Authors: Y. Feng, Y. Jin
Constant Approximation of Arboricity in Near-Optimal Sublinear Time
Authors: J. Dai, M. Ghaffari, J. Portmann
High-to-Low Dimensional PPA-completeness: Borsuk-Ulam, Tucker, Consensus Halving, and Ham Sandwich
Authors: R. Gao, A. Hollender, A. Rubinstein
Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes via Utility Alignment: Unit-Demand Pricing and More
Authors: R. Bowers, M. Garbea, E. Pountourakis, S. Taggart
Lower Bounds for Non-adaptive Local Computation Algorithms
Authors: A. Azarmehr, S. Behnezhad, A. Ghafari, M. Sudan
Optimal Trickle-Down Theorems for Path Complexes via C-Lorentzian Polynomials with Applications to Sampling and Log-Concave Sequences
Authors: J. Leake, K. Lindberg, S. Gharan
Nearly Tight Regret Bounds for Profit Maximization in Bilateral Trade
Authors: S. Di Gregorio, P. Duetting, F. Fusco, C. Schwiegelshohn
10:30–10:50

Break ☕

10:50–12:02

Session 10A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 10B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 10C (Blackwattle 3)

Radial Isotropic Position via an Implicit Newton’s Method
Authors: A. Jambulapati, J. Li, K. Tian
Distributed Triangle Detection is Hard in Few Rounds
Authors: S. Assadi, J. Sundaresan
On optimal distinguishers for Planted Clique
Authors: A. Nagda, P. Raghavendra
Faster logconcave sampling from a cold start in high dimension
Authors: Y. Kook, S. Vempala
Round Elimination via Self-Reduction: Closing Gaps for Distributed Maximal Matching
Authors: S. Khoury, A. Schild
Tight Low Degree Hardness for Optimizing Pure Spherical Spin Glasses
Authors: M. Sellke
Optimal Smoothed Analysis of the Simplex Method
Authors: E. Bach, S. Huiberts
Multi-Pass Streaming Lower Bounds for Approximating Max-Cut
Authors: Y. Fei, D. Minzer, S. Wang
The Quasi-Polynomial Low-Degree Conjecture is False
Authors: R. Buhai, J. Hsieh, A. Jain, P. Kothari
Handling LP-Rounding for Hierarchical Clustering and Fitting Distances by Ultrametrics
Authors: H. An, M. Kao, C. Lee, M. Lee
A Polynomial Space Lower Bound for Diameter Estimation in Dynamic Streams
Authors: S. Khanna, A. Padaki, K. Singal, E. Waingarten
PTF Testing Lower Bounds for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis
Authors: I. Diakonikolas, D. Kane, S. Liu, T. Pittas
12:021:30

Lunch (provided) 🍽️

1:30–2:24

Session 11A (Blackwattle 1)

Session 11B (Blackwattle 2)

Session 11C (Blackwattle 3)

Near-Optimal Property Testers for Pattern Matching
Authors: C. Jin, T. Kociumaka
Efficiently Batching Unambiguous Interactive Proofs
Authors: B. Berger, R. Goyal, M. Hong, Y. Kalai
Truly Subquadratic Time Algorithms for Diameter and Related Problems in Graphs of Bounded VC-dimension
Authors: T. Chan, H. Chang, J. Gao, S. Kisfaludi-Bak, H. Le, D. Zheng
Tight Pair Query Lower Bounds for Matching and Earth Mover’s Distance
Authors: A. Azarmehr, S. Behnezhad, M. Roghani, A. Rubinstein
Improved Round-by-round Soundness IOPs via Reed-Muller Codes
Authors: D. Minzer, K. Zheng
Shortest Paths on Convex Polyhedral Surfaces
Authors: H. Wang
Instance-Optimal Uniformity Testing and Tracking
Authors: G. Blanc, C. Canonne, E. Waingarten
Proving Natural Distribution Properties is Harder than Testing Them
Authors: T. Herman, G. Rothblum
Dynamic Dyck and Tree Edit Distance: Decompositions and Reductions to String Edit Distance
Authors: D. Das, J. Gilbert, T. Kociumaka, M. Hajiaghayi, B. Saha
2:24–2:55

Break ☕

2:55–3:55

🏆 Best student papers

Godel in Cryptography: Effectively Zero Knowledge Proofs for NP with No Interaction, No Setup, and Perfect Soundness
Author: R. Ilango
Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs
Authors: M-Y. Huang, E-C. Tang
3:55–4:20

Break

4:20–5:50

🏆 Best papers

Explicit Lossless Vertex Expanders
Authors: J-T. Hsieh, A. Lubotzky, S. Mohanty, A. Reiner, R. Y. Zhang
Quasipolynomial bounds for the corners theorem
Authors: M. Jaber, Y. P. Liu, S. Lovett, A. Ostuni, M. Sawhney
Breaking a Long-Standing Barrier: 2-$\varepsilon$ Approximation for Steiner Forest
Authors: A. Ahmadi, I. Gholami, M. Hajiaghayi, P. Jabbarzade, M. Mahdavi