FORC 2026 Program

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Location: Science & Engineering Complex – 150 Western Ave, Allston, MA 02134

For presentations, 1.321 (Winokur Hall). For Poster Session, breakfast, coffee breaks: West Atrium 

• For WIFI connectivity: The guest Wi-Fi throughout the SEC, guests can register their devices here for access. If they already have eduroam they will be able to access WIFI. 
• The following reserved spaces are for research collaboration: 1.402 (capacity 67), 1.412 (capacity 24), 1.413 (capacity 24), 1.414 (capacity 24)

8:00 AM–9:00 AM Breakfast

9:00 AM–10:15 AM Session 1 Session Chair: Jon Ullman

Privacy amplification by random allocation
M. Shenfeld, V. Feldman

No One Size Fits All: Exploring Heterogeneous Differential Privacy
M. Aliakbarpour, A. Fallah, S. Roy, R. Stevens

Trade-offs in Data Memorization via Strong Data Processing Inequalities
V. Feldman, G. Kornowski, X. Lyu

Optimal partition selection with Rényi differential privacy
C. Harrison, P. Manurangsi

10:15 AM–10:45 AM Coffee Break

10:45 AM–12:00 PM Award Session I, Session Chair: Katrina Ligett

Best Paper Award

Nearly-Optimal Private Selection via Gaussian Mechanism
E. Leeman, P. Manurangsi

A Machine Learning Theory Perspective on Strategic Litigation
M. Dutz, H. Shao, A. Blum, A. Cohen

The Importance of Being Smoothly Calibrated
P. Gopalan, K. Stavropoulos, K. Talwar, P. Tankala

Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention

Limitations on Accurate, Trusted, Human-level Reasoning
R. Panigrahy, V. Sharan

12:00 PM–2:00 PM Lunch (on your own)

2:00 PM–3:15 PM Session 3, Session Chair: Kate Donahue

When to Ask a Question: Understanding Communication Strategies in Generative AI Tools
C. Park, K. Donahue, M. Raghavan

Serving Clients Fairly: On Facility Location and $k$-Median with Fair Outliers
R. Dabas, S. Khuller, E. Rivkin

Reliable Abstention under Adversarial Injections: Tight Lower Bounds and New Upper Bounds
E. Edelman, S. Goel

Defensive Generation
G. Farina, J. Perdomo

3:15 PM–3:45 PM Coffee Break

3:30PM – 5:00PM Poster Session with Coffee and Refreshments

5:15 PM–5:45 PM Business Meeting

Thursday, June 4th, 2026

Location: Science & Engineering Complex – 150 Western Ave, Allston, MA 02134

For presentations, 1.321 (Winokur Hall). For Poster Session, breakfast, coffee breaks: West Atrium 

8:00 AM–9:00 AM Breakfast

9:00 AM–10:15 AM Award Session II, Session Chair: Adam Smith

Best Student Paper Award

Incentivizing High-Quality Content in Online Recommender Systems
X. Hu, M. Jagadeesan, M. Jordan, J. Steinhardt

Inducing Efficient and Equitable Professional Networks through Link Recommendations
C. Dwork, C. Hays, L. Hu, N. Immorlica, J. Perdomo

Best Paper Award, Honorable Mention

Computational Hardness of Private Coreset
B. Ghazi, C. Guzmán, P. Kamath, A. Knop, R. Kumar, P. Manurangsi

Protecting the Undeleted in Machine Unlearning
A. Cohen, R. Kohen, K. Nissim, U. Stemmer

10:15 AM–10:45 AM Coffee Break

10:45 AM–12:00 PM Session 2, Session Chair: Ira Globus-Harris

The Statistical Fairness-Accuracy Frontier
A. Fallah, M. Jordan, A. Ulichney

Can Users Fix Algorithms? A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Collective Content Amplification in Recommender Systems
E. Fedorova, M. Kitch, C. Podimata

How Global Calibration Strengthens Multiaccuracy
S. Casacuberta, P. Gopalan, V. Kanade, O. Reingold

Understanding and Mitigating the Impacts of Differentially Private Census Data on State Level Redistricting & Looking Ahead to the 2030 Census
C. Cianfarani, A. Cohen

12:00 PM–2:00 PM Lunch (on your own)

2:00 PM–3:00 PM Session 3, Session Chair: Rachel Lin

Invited Talk by Shafi Goldwasser

Random Self Reducibility: from cryptography to ML theory and practice

3:00 PM–3:30 PM Coffee Break

3:30 PM–4:45 PM Session 4, Session Chair: Aloni Cohen

Learning in an Echo Chamber: Online Learning with Replay Adversary
D. Dmitriev, H. Franck, C. Heinzler, A. Sanyal

On the Limits of Language Generation: Trade-Offs Between Hallucination and Mode Collapse
A. Kalavasis, A. Mehrotra, G. Velegkas

Can we Watermark Low-Entropy LLM Outputs?
N. Mazor, A. Morgan, R. Pass

How Sampling Shapes LLM Alignment: From One-Shot Optima to Iterative Dynamics
Y. Chen, Y. He, M. Jordan, F. Yao

Friday, June 5th, 2026

Location: Science & Engineering Complex – 150 Western Ave, Allston, MA 02134

For presentations, 1.321 (Winokur Hall). For Poster Session, breakfast, coffee breaks: West Atrium 

8:00 AM–9:00 AM Breakfast

9:00 AM–10:15 AM Session 1, Session Chair: Ira Globus-Harris

Local Node Differential Privacy
S. Raskhodnikova, A. Smith, C. Wagaman, A. Zavyalov

A Differentially Private Approximation of the Width Problem
M. Hale, O. Sheffet

Separating Oblivious and Adaptive Differential Privacy under Continual Observation
M. Bun, M. Gaboardi, C. Wagaman

Normalized Square Root: Sharper Matrix Factorization Bounds for Differentially Private Continual Counting
M. Henzinger, N. Kalinin, J. Upadhyay

10:15 AM–10:45 AM Coffee Break

10:45 AM–12:00 PM Session 2, Session Chair: Adam Smith

Invited Talk by Ariel Procaccia

No Generation Without Representation

Abstract:: AI systems and democratic processes are confronting similar challenges around representation. I examine two related questions that cut across both domains. First, how can AI enable democratic processes that handle vast spaces of opinions or statements while ensuring proportional representation of a population’s views? Second, when AI systems themselves provide normative guidance, whose viewpoints do they reflect, and can we make this precise? Drawing on social choice theory, I present formal frameworks and algorithms for both problems, showing that meaningful representation guarantees are feasible and practical. 

Brief bio: Ariel Procaccia is the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. He works on a broad and dynamic set of problems related to AI, algorithms, economics, and society. He has helped create systems and platforms that are widely used to solve everyday fair division problems, resettle refugees, distribute food, and select citizens’ assemblies. To make his research accessible to the public, he has written numerous opinion and exposition pieces for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Wired, and Scientific American. He is an ACM Fellow (2025), a AAAI Fellow (2024), and a recipient of the ACM SIGecom Mid-Career Award (2024), Social Choice and Welfare Prize (2020), Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2015), and Sloan Research Fellowship (2015). In 2026, he was named Harvard College Professor in recognition of excellence in undergraduate teaching. 

12:00 PM–2:00 PM Lunch (on your own)

2:00 PM–3:15 PM Session 3, Session Chair: Maryam Aliakbarpour 

Exact zCDP Characterizations for Fundamental Differentially Private Mechanisms
C. Harrison, P. Manurangsi

Learning Rate Scheduling with Matrix Factorization for Private Training
N. Kalinin, J. Andersson

Tradeoffs in Privacy, Welfare, and Fairness for Facility Location
S. Fish, Y. Gonczarowski, J. Tang, S. Vadhan

Privacy, Prediction, and Allocation
B. Jacobsen, N. Kohli

3:15 PM–3:45 PM Coffee Break

3:45 PM–5:00 PM Session 4, Session Chair: Alireza Fallah

Fair Multi-agent Persuasion with Submodular Constraints
Y. Bai, K. Munagala, Y. Shen, D. Zhu

Packing Compact Subgraphs with Applications to Districting
H. Chen, P. Chou, P. Dharangutte, J. Gao, S. Huang, F. Yu

Two papers on risk-aware hypothesis testing — Nomination for FORC 2026 Highlights Track
F. Shi, S. Bates, M. Wainwright

Escaping the Subprime Trap in Algorithmic Lending
A. Bouyamourn, A. Tolbert