Contact

Email: bmhuang at mit dot edu

Hello! I am a fifth year PhD student in EECS at MIT, where I am fortunate to be advised by Guy Bresler and Nike Sun. I was previously an undergraduate at MIT, where I majored in mathematics and EECS.

I am broadly interested in high-dimensional probability and statistical physics. More specifically, my work studies statistical and algorithmic thresholds for optimization, sampling, and inference problems in disordered settings.

I am grateful to be supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. I was previously supported by a NSF Graduate Fellowship (2020-23) and a Siebel Scholarship (2020-21).

I am on the 2024-25 academic job market.

Selected Papers

See my research page for a full list.

• B. Huang and M. Sellke. Strong Low Degree Hardness for Stable Local Optima in Spin Glasses.
  Preprint 2025.

• B. Huang, S. Mohanty, A. Rajaraman, and D. X. Wu. Weak Poincaré Inequalities, Simulated Annealing, and Sampling from Spherical Spin Glasses.
  To appear in STOC 2025.

• B. Huang. Capacity Threshold for the Ising Perceptron.
  FOCS 2024. Best Student Paper.

• B. Huang, A. Montanari, and H. T. Pham. Sampling from Spherical Spin Glasses in Total Variation via Algorithmic Stochastic Localization.
  Preprint 2024.

• B. Huang and M. Sellke. A Constructive Proof of the Spherical Parisi Formula.
  Preprint 2023.

• S. Chen, B. Huang, J. Li, A. Liu, and M. Sellke. When Does Adaptivity Help for Quantum State Learning?
  FOCS 2023.

• B. Huang and M. Sellke. Tight Lipschitz Hardness for Optimizing Mean Field Spin Glasses.
  Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 78(1) (2025), 60-119.
  Conference version: FOCS 2022.

• G. Bresler and B. Huang. The Algorithmic Phase Transition of Random k-SAT for Low Degree Polynomials.
  FOCS 2021.