I'm a PhD student in computer science at UCLA advised by Guy Van den Broeck. Previously I studied math and computer science (BS and MS) at GWU, advised by the stupendous Poorvi Vora.

Contact me by email: obroadrick (at) ucla (dot) edu

Research

Tractable Modeling. What (minimal) properties of an AI model enable provable guarantees about its behavior? I study the tradeoff in models between expressive-efficiency (size) and tractability (computational complexity of answering queries about the model), especially focused on probabilistic models tractable for the fundamental query of marginalization [5,6,8,9].

Statistical Election Audits. Previously I studied and developed rigorous statistical procedures for detecting errors in election results [1,3,4].

Publications
Also see my Google Scholar page.
  1. Poorva Garg, Benjie Wang, Oliver Broadrick, Guy Van den Broeck, Todd Millstein. Bitblasting for Constrained Decorrelation in Tractable Image Modeling. TPM Workshop at UAI 2025. (forthcoming)
  2. Oliver Broadrick, Sanyam Agarwal, Guy Van den Broeck, Markus Bläser. The Limits of Tractable Marginalization. ICML, 2025. (pdf, arXiv)
  3. Anji Liu, Oliver Broadrick, Mathias Niepert, Guy Van den Broeck. Discrete Copula Diffusion. ICLR, 2025. (pdf, arXiv)
  4. Oliver Broadrick, William Cao, Benjie Wang, Martin Trapp, Guy Van den Broeck. Probabilistic Circuits for Cumulative Distribution Functions. TPM Workshop at UAI 2024. (pdf, arXiv)
  5. Oliver Broadrick, Honghua Zhang, Guy Van den Broeck. Polynomial Semantics of Tractable Probabilistic Circuits. UAI 2024, Oral Presentation. (pdf, arXiv, talk, slides)
  6. Oliver Broadrick. Risk-Limiting Audit PROVIDENCE and Round Size Considerations. MS Thesis, The George Washington University, 2023. (pdf)
  7. Oliver Broadrick, Poorvi Vora, and Filip Zagórski. PROVIDENCE: a Flexible Round-by-Round Risk-Limiting Audit. USENIX Security 2023. (pdf, usenix, talk, slides, earlier arXiv version)
  8. Hesham Fouad, Oliver Broadrick, Benjamin Harvey, Charles Peeke, and Bhagirath Narahari. Real-Time AI: Using AI on the Tactical Edge. Elsevier book chapter in "Putting AI in the Critical Loop: Assured Trust and Autonomy in Human-Machine Teams", invited chapter based on presentation at 2022 AAAI Spring Symposium. (link)
  9. Oliver Broadrick, Sarah Morin, Grant McClearn, Neal McBurnett, Poorvi L. Vora, and Filip Zagórski. Simulations of Ballot Polling Risk-Limiting Audits. Seventh Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting, in association with Financial Cryptography 2022. (pdf, talk, slides)
Research Talks
  • May 2024, "Polynomial Semantics of Tractable Probabilistic Circuits." Invited talk, SNAIL Seminar, University of São Paulo. (slides)
  • August 2023, "PROVIDENCE: a Flexible Round-by-Round Risk-Limiting Audit". USENIX Security. (talk, slides)

Teaching

I have tutored students at the high school and college level in mathematics, computer science, and physics, and I've been a teaching assistant:

  • Algorithms and Complexity: Spring 2025, Summer 2025 (UCLA)
  • Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence: Fall 2024 (UCLA)
  • Foundations of Computing: Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023 (GWU)
  • Discrete Structures: Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022 (GWU)

Please give me anonymous feedback on my teaching.

Other


"They did not die! I never said died. We lost them, I said. We lost them and we cannot find them." -Tolkien