Last Thursday, @stefanos_pert Stefanos Pertigkiozoglou defended his PhD. Stefanos is one of the deepest and most thorough thinkers I worked with. He is the definition of quiet power. His key insight was that enforcing exact equivariance throughout optimization can unnecessarily restrict expressivity. By relaxing equivariance constraints during training, his methods reached solutions that preserve the benefits of symmetry while escaping the restricted equivariant landscapes (ICML'25 and Neurips'24, plus TMLR, ICLR, Neureps). I am so proud of you Stefanos!
Thank you @_onionesque for the inspiration and Stefanos' mentoring in the relaxation work, as well as to @RobinSFWalters, @ParisPerdikaris, @EdgarDobriban, Pratik Chaudhari, and Jean Gallier, for making committee exams a resource for learning.