Yusuf Hakan Kalaycı

General Information

Yusuf Hakan Kalaycı Department of Computer Science University of Southern California Email: yhkalayci@gmail.com, kalayci@usc.edu Github: @yhkalayci

I am a Ph.D. candidae at the Computer Science department of the University of Southern California, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Shaddin Dughmi and Prof. David Kempe.

My research focuses on theory of optimal stopping, combinatorial optimization, and computational social choice, with applications to inference-time optimization for accurate, aligned, and efficient large language models.

Publications

• LYNX: Learning Dynamic Exits for Confidence-Controlled Reasoning
  Omer Faruk Akgül, Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Rajgopal Kannan, Willie Neiswanger, Viktor Prasanna (in submission)

• Relationships and Connections between Definitions of Metric Proportional Representation
  Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, David Kempe (in submission)

• Temporal Panel Selection in Ongoing Citizens’ Assemblies
  Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Evi Micha (in submission)

• Optimal Stopping vs Best-of-N for Inference Time Optimization
  Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Vinod Raman, Shaddin Dughmi (in submission)

• Near-Optimal Sparsifiers for Stochastic Knapsack and Assignment Problems
  Shaddin Dughmi, Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Xinyu Liu ITCS 2026 (to appear)

• Full Proportional Justified Representation
  Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, David Kempe, Jiasen Liu AAMAS 2025

• Is Transductive Learning Equivalent to PAC Learning?
  Shaddin Dughmi, Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Grayson York ALT 2025

• Limitations of Stochastic Selection Problems with Pairwise Independent Priors
  Shaddin Dughmi, Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Neel Patel STOC 2024

• Proportional Representation in Metric Spaces and Low-Distortion Committee Selection
  Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, David Kempe, Vikram Kher AAAI 2024

• On Sparsification of Stochastic Packing Problems
  Shaddin Dughmi, Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, Neel Patel ICALP 2023

Teaching

Teaching Assistant

• CSCI 670 Advanced Analysis of Algorithms, taught by David Kempe,
  University of Southern California, Computer Science, Spring 2025.

• Training of Turkish National Olympiad team in Informatics
  Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), 2022-Present.

• Training of USC ACM-ICPC Teams
  University of Southern California, 2023-2024.

• CSCI 670 Advanced Analysis of Algorithms, taught by David Kempe,
  University of Southern California, Computer Science, Fall 2022.

• CSCI 670 Advanced Analysis of Algorithms, taught by Shang-Hua Teng,
  University of Southern California, Computer Science, Fall 2021.

• Algorithmic Competition Summer Camp 2018, Summer 2018
  inzva

Working Experience

• Research Advisor at palmate.ai (Jun. 2022 - Present)

• Algorithm Community Technical Lead at inzva (Jul. 2017 - Aug 2019)

• Business Technical Intern at Google, Dublin/Ireland (Jul. 2016 - Sept. 2016)

• Judge and problem setter in Turkish National Olympiads in Informatics (2013 - Present)

Awards and Honors

• Gold Medal in International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) 2013, in Australia

• Gold Medal in Balkan Olympiad in Informatics (BOI) 2013, in Bosnia and Herzegovina

• Gold Medal in Turkish National Olympiad in Informatics 2013