Nuri Mert Vural

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I’m a final-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, advised by Murat Erdogdu, and affiliated with the Vector Institute. In Summer 2025, I was a research intern at the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Mathematics, working with Alberto Bietti and Denny Wu. Previously, I completed an M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University, advised by Süleyman Kozat.

My research lies at the intersection of optimization and statistics. My PhD work focuses on the dynamics of gradient-based methods in high-dimensional settings, with an emphasis on neural network training. I’ve also worked on stochastic optimization, online learning, bandit algorithms, and non-convex optimization.

Email: vural (at) cs (dot) toronto (dot) edu.

Selected works
  1. Gérard Ben Arous, Murat A. Erdogdu, Nuri Mert Vural, Denny Wu. Learning Quadratic Neural Networks in High Dimensions: SGD Dynamics and Scaling Laws. NeurIPS 2025.
  2. Nuri Mert Vural, Murat A. Erdogdu. Pruning is Optimal for Learning Sparse Features in High Dimensions. COLT 2024.