Anıl Kamber

Jacobs Hall, Room 4516

9736 Engineers Ln.

La Jolla, CA 92092

Hey! I am Anıl, and I am a second year ECE PhD student at University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, advised by Rahul Parhi.

I am exploring the mysteries of optimization dynamics in neural networks and transformer-based architectures. In particular, I am trying to understand why these models generalize well despite being highly overparameterized.

I received my bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. My bachelor’s thesis, titled Blind Source Separation in Neuroscience, which was advised by Alper Erdogan and Burak Acar, won the Cenker Oden Senior Design Project Award, awarded for the best theoretical undergraduate research. Additionally, I derived the channel response of a SISO molecular communication system in a 3-D half-space with an infinite reflecting surface, under the supervision of Ali Emre Pusane.

I am also interested in theoretical neuroscience.

selected publications and preprints

IEEE TMBMC

Half-Space Modeling With Reflecting Surface in Molecular Communication

Anıl Kamber, H Birkan Yilmaz, Ali E. Pusane, and 1 more author

IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications, 2024

DOI Bib

@article{kamber2024half,
  title = {Half-Space Modeling With Reflecting Surface in Molecular Communication},
  author = {Kamber, Anıl and Yilmaz, H Birkan and Pusane, Ali E. and Tugcu, Tuna},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/TMBMC.2024.3448353},
}

NeurIPS Workshop

Hessian Spectrum is Constant Across Minimizers in Regularized Deep Scalar Factorization

Anıl Kamber and Rahul Parhi

In OPT 2025: Optimization for Machine Learning, 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{kamber2025hessian,
  title = {Hessian Spectrum is Constant Across Minimizers in Regularized Deep Scalar Factorization},
  author = {Kamber, Anıl and Parhi, Rahul},
  booktitle = {OPT 2025: Optimization for Machine Learning},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://opt-ml.org/papers/2025/paper84.pdf}
}

Sharpness of Minima in Deep Matrix Factorization: Exact Expressions

Anıl Kamber and Rahul Parhi

2025

arXiv Bib

@unpublished{kamber2025sharpnessminimadeepmatrix,
  title = {Sharpness of Minima in Deep Matrix Factorization: Exact Expressions},
  author = {Kamber, Anıl and Parhi, Rahul},
  year = {2025},
  status = {Manuscripts Under Review},
}