Akshay Kumar

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Email: kumar511@umn.edu
Google scholar and Twitter

I am seeking a postdoctoral position. Please contact me if you have an opening.

About me

I'm currently pursuing my Ph.D. in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where I am advised by Jarvis Haupt. My research interests are in machine learning and optimization, particularly on deep learning theory. Before starting my Ph.D., I received my B.Tech.-M.Tech. (Dual Degree) in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

My recent research has focused on understanding the gradient flow dynamics of homogeneous neural networks trained in the small initialization regime. Our work uncovers phenomena such as directional convergence and the emergence of sparsity structures among the weights. These insights ultimately led us to a greedy algorithm for training deep neural networks, called Neuron Pursuit. I have also summarized my work in tweet1 and tweet2.

Publications