Yeyuan Chen wins Best Student Paper Award at STOC 2025

Yeyuan Chen, a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Michigan, has been recognized with a Best Student Paper Award at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). His winning paper, coauthored with Zihan Zhang from Ohio State University, is titled “Explicit Folded Reed-Solomon and Multiplicity Codes Achieve Relaxed Generalized Singleton Bounds.”

STOC, taking place June 23-27 in Prague, Czech Republic, is a leading conference for theoretical computer science, attracting top researchers from around the world to share the latest findings and developments in this area. The conference’s Best Student Paper Award honors innovative research contributions made by student authors. 

Chen and Zhang’s paper is rooted in coding theory, which centers around developing codes to make data transmission more accurate and robust to errors. Specifically, their work focuses on Folded Reed-Solomon (FRS) codes and multiplicity codes, demonstrating that these codes meet relaxed generalized Singleton bounds for list decoding. This means they can correct more errors while using a relatively simple code structure. This advancement significantly enhances the efficiency of data transmission and error correction processes, which are crucial for reliable communications in digital systems.

In addition, their paper extends the analysis of list-recovery capabilities for FRS codes. It provides a more precise understanding of how these codes perform when tasked with reconstructing data from limited or noisy information. The findings draw a clearer distinction between list decoding, which identifies all possible valid outputs given a noisy input, and list recovery, which focuses on reconstructing data from partial inputs.

In all, Chen and Zhang’s work paves the way for further research into the theoretical capabilities and limits of these coding strategies, providing a foundation for more advanced data reliability techniques.

Chen is a second-year PhD student in CSE, advised by Prof. Mahdi Cheraghchi. His research interests include coding theory, combinatorics and algebra, and machine learning theory. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China.