Brendon G. Anderson
 |
Brendon G. Anderson Assistant Professor
|
I am currently looking for graduate students to join my research projects. Highly motivated students with strengths in mathematics and computer programming are especially encouraged to reach out.
About
I am interested in the development and analysis of safe and reliable computational methods by applying rigorous mathematics to interdisciplinary problems in the areas of machine learning, optimization, control theory, and game theory. My latest projects surround provable safety for neural networks using robust optimization theory, stability guarantees for infinite-dimensional evolutionary games using functional analysis, and robust control of distributed systems using optimal transport theory. I encourage you to look at my publications for more details.
Fun fact: I have an Erdős number of \(3\) (Paul Erdős \(\sim\) Fan Chung \(\sim\) Andrea L. Bertozzi \(\sim\) Brendon G. Anderson).
News
October 2026: New paper: “Elimination of adversarial strategies from population game dynamics via partial feedback linearization penalty control.”
June 2025: Excited to have Jack Pearson begin his graduate research with our group!
June 2026: I served as a reviewer for NeurIPS.
May 27, 2026: I am chairing the “Game Theory III” session and giving a talk at the American Control Conference on our paper “Choice paralysis in evolutionary games.”
April 2026: I served as a reviewer for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
March 2026: Excited to have a project proposal awarded by the Bently Center: “Control-Theoretic Mitigation of Adversarial Behaviors in Dynamic Population Games: Cheating, Lying, and Laziness at the Societal Scale.”
March 2026: Applications for Cal Poly College of Engineering's Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) are now open, and are due April 13th! I will be leading the SURP project “A Dynamic Population Games Approach to Nonconvex Optimization with Applications to AI.”
January 2026: “Choice paralysis in evolutionary games” accepted for oral presentation at the American Control Conference. See you in New Orleans!
January 2026: Awarded a Noyce School of Applied Computing grant with Professors Siyuan Xing and Maria Pantoja (32% proposal acceptance rate).
November 2025: Paper accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS): “Choice paralysis in evolutionary games.”
October 2025: I was selected as a ‘‘Top Reviewer’’ (top 10%) for NeurIPS 2025.
October 2025: I served as a reviewer for the American Control Conference (ACC).
October 7, 2025: I am giving a talk in the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar series (ME 563): “Provably reliable computation for safety-critical systems: AI, optimization, control, and beyond.”
October 2025: I served as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
September 2025: Excited to welcome Olivia Hoffsis to our research group!
September 2025: Paper accepted for presentation at the Reliable ML from Unreliable Data Workshop at NeurIPS 2025: “Certified adversarial robustness via mixture-of-Gaussians randomized smoothing.”
September 2025: New paper: “Choice paralysis in evolutionary games.”
August 2025: New paper: “Certified adversarial robustness via mixture-of-Gaussians randomized smoothing.”
August 2025: I served on the program committee for the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
August 2025: New paper: “Robust optimal transport model predictive control for distribution steering.”
July 2025: Paper accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control: “Evolutionary games on infinite strategy sets: Convergence to Nash equilibria via dissipativity.”
June 2025: I served as a reviewer for NeurIPS.
June 2025: Excited to welcome Faith Bergstrom to our research group!
May 29, 2025: I am giving a lightning talk at Cal Poly's Robotics Scholarship Synergy Event: “Machine learning with robustness guarantees.”
May 2025: Paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR): “Towards optimal branching of linear and semidefinite relaxations for neural network robustness certification.”
May 2025: I served as a reviewer for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
April 2025: Applications for Cal Poly College of Engineering's Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) are now open, and are due May 2nd! I will be leading the SURP project “AI Under Attack: Building Certifiably Safe Machine Learning Systems through Input-Dependent Randomized Smoothing.”
April 2025: Applications for the College Skateboarding Educational Foundation Scholarship are now open, and are due June 1st!
April 2025: I served as a reviewer for the IEEE Control Systems Letters.
April 2025: Excited to welcome Vaughn Rostermundt to our research group!
March 2025: Our group member, Walker Waite, was awarded the 2025 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) scholarship from the California Space Grant Consortium. Congrats, Walker!
March 2025: I am ecstatic to announce that I received the 2025–2026 Research, Scholarly and Creative Activities (RSCA) grant (23% proposal acceptance rate).
March 2025: I served as a reviewer for the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Series A).
March 2025: I served as a reviewer for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), and for the ICML Workshops.
February 2025: I served as a reviewer for the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).
January 2025: I am excited to have two amazing students, Ben Sager and Walker Waite, join our research group!
December 18, 2024: I am giving a talk at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control on our paper “Approximately Gaussian replicator flows: Nonconvex optimization as a Nash-convergent evolutionary game.”
December 2, 2024: I was featured in a Cal Poly College of Engineering Faculty Spotlight interview.
November 1, 2024: I am giving a talk in the Cal Poly Mathematics Colloquium series: “Mathematics of AI safety: The power of convexity in a highly nonconvex world.”
October 22, 2024: I am giving a talk in the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar series (ME 563): “Provably robust machine learning through structure-aware computation.”
September 2024: Paper accepted for publication at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC): “Approximately Gaussian replicator flows: Nonconvex optimization as a Nash-convergent evolutionary game”
September 2024: I have joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at California Polytechnic State University as an Assistant Professor.