Yinchen Liu

Yinchen Liu

Undergraduate
Tsinghua University

About Me

I’m a senior undergraduate student (since 2023 Fall) at Tsinghua University.

In Spring 2026, I was a visiting student at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Ryan O’Donnell, working on high-dimensional expanders (HDXs) and their applications to probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs). Prior to this, I had the great pleasure of working with Prof. Huacheng Yu on streaming lower bounds. I have also greatly enjoyed collaborating with Prof. Jian Li at Tsinghua University.

I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics. What fascinates me most is the rich interplay between the two, and I am actively exploring problems at their interface. My current research interests include:

  • Streaming lower bounds and communication complexity
  • Spectral and extremal graph theory
  • Pseudorandomness and additive combinatorics
  • High-dimensional expanders and the algebraic structures behind them

News

  • 2026.07:     Our paper on turnstile streaming vs. linear sketching is accepted to FOCS 2026!
  • 2026.02:     Started a research internship at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Ryan O’Donnell.
  • 2025.07:     Our paper on adaptivity gaps for stochastic probing is accepted to FOCS 2025!

Publications

In theoretical computer science, authors are conventionally listed in alphabetical order.

  • Turnstile Streaming Algorithms Might (Still) as Well Be Linear Sketches, for Polynomial-Length Streams
    Cheng Jiang, Yinchen Liu, Huacheng Yu
    To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), 2026.
    [arXiv] [video]

  • Adaptivity Gaps for Stochastic Probing with Subadditive Functions
    Jian Li, Yinchen Liu, Yiran Zhang
    In the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), 2025.
    [arXiv] [video]

  • On the Positive and Negative $p$-Energies of Graphs under Edge Addition
    Quanyu Tang, Yinchen Liu, Wei Wang
    In Discrete Applied Mathematics, vol. 388, pp. 25–33, 2026.
    [journal] [arXiv]

Honors and Awards

  • Friends of Tsinghua – Lingjun Pilot Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2026
  • Friends of Tsinghua – Mingde Zhizhi Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2026
  • Merit Student, Tsinghua University 2026
  • National Scholarship, the highest honor for undergraduates in China, top 0.5% 2024 & 2025
  • Academic Excellence Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2024 & 2025
  • Freshman Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2023
  • Merit Award, S.-T. Yau College Student Mathematics Contest (Algebra and Number Theory) 2023
  • Merit Award, S.-T. Yau College Student Mathematics Contest (Probability and Statistics) 2023
  • Merit Award, Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition 2022
  • China Team Selection Test (TST) for IMO, rank 9 2021
  • Gold Medal, Chinese Mathematical Olympiad (CMO), rank 16 2021
  • Gold Medal, Chinese Mathematical Olympiad (CMO), rank 6 2020

Education

2023.09 – 2027.06 (expected) Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • Bachelor of Engineering
  • Overall GPA: 4.00/4.00, Rank: 1/90
  • TOEFL: 115/120
2020.09 – 2023.06 Shanghai High School, Shanghai, China.
  • Mathematics class
  • Diamond Award (×2), top 10/400 each year

Services

  • Reviewer for The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (EJC) 2026