Weijie Su
Associate Professor
Wharton Statistics and Data Science Department
and, by courtesy, Departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics, Computer and Information Science, and Mathematics
Co-Director
Penn Research in Machine Learning
University of Pennsylvania
Office: 411 Academic Research Building
Email: suw AT wharton DOT upenn DOT edu
Research Interests
(Long-term) Mathematical, compute-light approaches to understanding deep learning and AI
(Current) Statistical foundations of large language models, privacy-preserving machine learning, high-dimensional statistics, mathematical optimization
Founding Co-Editor
Statistical Learning and Data Science
Associate Editor
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Journal of the American Statistical Association
Operations Research
The Annals of Applied Statistics
Harvard Data Science Review
Foundations and TrendsĀ® in Statistics
Journal of the Operations Research Society of China
Communications in Mathematical Sciences
Recent Featured Papers
- Isotropic Curvature Model for Understanding Deep Learning Optimization: Is Gradient Orthogonalization Optimal? W. Su.
- Do Large Language Models (Really) Need Statistical Foundations? W. Su.
- Statistical Impossibility and Possibility of Aligning LLMs with Human Preferences: From Condorcet Paradox to Nash Equilibrium. K. Liu, Q. Long, Z. Shi, W. Su, and J. Xiao.
- The 2020 United States Decennial Census Is More Private Than You (Might) Think. B. Su, W. Su, and C. Wang.
- A Statistical Viewpoint on Differential Privacy: Hypothesis Testing, Representation and Blackwell's Theorem. W. Su.
- A Statistical Framework of Watermarks for Large Language Models: Pivot, Detection Efficiency and Optimal Rules. X. Li, F. Ruan, H. Wang, Q. Long, and W. Su.
- A Law of Next-Token Prediction in Large Language Models. H. He and W. Su.
News
- November 2025. A paper was invited for presentation at the JRSSB Editors Invited Session at the 2026 RSS Conference in the UK.
- September 2025. A paper was invited for presentation at The Annals of Applied Statistics Invited Paper Session at JSM 2026.
- September 2025. Our paper You Are the Best Reviewer of Your Own Papers: The Isotonic Mechanism is accepted to Operations Research.
- September 2025. Our paper The 2020 United States Decennial Census Is More Private Than You (Might) Think is accepted to PNAS.
- September 2025. I will serve as the Scientific Integrity Chair for ICML 2026.
- August 2025. I received the Outstanding Young Talent Award in the 2025 China Annual Review of Mathematics.
- July 2025. I was selected to deliver the IMS Medallion Award and Lecture in 2027.
- May 2025. Our paper on the ICML ranking experiment will appear as a Discussion Paper in JASA.
- May 2025. I was elected as a Fellow of IMS.
- May 2025. I'll serve as the Program Chair for the ASA Text Analysis Section starting January 1, 2026.
- March 2025. We offered (with Qi Long and Inyoung Choi) a short course on large language models at ENAR 2025.
- January 2025. Our third ranking experiment (with Buxin Su) was successfully conducted at ICML 2025. See more details in OpenRank.