Meena Jagadeesan



PhD Student

UC Berkeley

I'm a 4th year PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. My advisors are Michael I. Jordan and Jacob Steinhardt, and I’m affiliated with the Berkeley AI Research Lab, CLIMB, and the Theory Group. I'm supported by an Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship, a PD Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and a Berkeley Fellowship.

Before coming to Berkeley, I received an A.B. and S.M. in computer science, math, and statistics at Harvard, where I was advised by Jelani Nelson. In the summer of 2020, I interned virtually at Microsoft Research Redmond with Suriya Gunasekar and Ilya Razenshteyn. In the summer of 2023, I interned at Microsoft Research New England with Nicole Immorlica and Brendan Lucier. This summer, I'll be interning again at Microsoft Research New England.

Here's my CV and my contact info.

Research Overview

My research centers around machine learning in marketplaces (e.g., content recommendation marketplaces, emerging marketplaces built on a foundation model, etc.). I investigate how interactions between ML models and competitive pressures can disrupt model performance, market participant behavior, and market structure.

For example, some of my recent work characterizes how content creator competition in recommender systems can impact supply-side diversity, how competition between model-providers can induce non-monotonic scaling laws, and how a platform can leverage market power to shape users.

I've also investigated the interplay between ML models and market competition in strategic classification, matching markets with transfers, and advertising auctions.

Papers

(* denotes equal contribution, α-β denotes alphabetical ordering)

Preprints
  • Impact of Decentralized Learning on Player Utilities in Stackelberg Games
    (α-β) Kate Donahue, Nicole Immorlica, Meena Jagadeesan, Brendan Lucier, and Aleksandrs Slivkins.
    [arXiv]

  • Feedback Loops With Language Models Drive In-Context Reward Hacking
    Alexander Pan, Erik Jones, Meena Jagadeesan, and Jacob Steinhardt.
    [arXiv]

  • Incentivizing High-Quality Content in Online Recommender Systems
    Xinyan Hu*, Meena Jagadeesan*, Michael I. Jordan, and Jacob Steinhardt.
    [arXiv]
Publications
  • Clickbait vs. Quality: How Engagement-Based Optimization Shapes the Content Landscape in Online Platforms
    (α-β) Nicole Immorlica, Meena Jagadeesan, and Brendan Lucier.
    The Web Conference (WWW) 2024.
    [paper] [slides]

  • Can Probabilistic Feedback Drive User Impacts in Online Platforms?
    (α-β) Jessica Dai, Bailey Flanigan, Nika Haghtalab, Meena Jagadeesan, and Chara Podimata
    AISTATS 2024.
    [paper]

  • Improved Bayes Risk Can Yield Reduced Social Welfare Under Competition
    Meena Jagadeesan, Michael I. Jordan, Jacob Steinhardt, and Nika Haghtalab.
    NeurIPS 2023.
    [paper] [talk] [slides] [poster]

  • Supply-Side Equilibria in Recommender Systems
    Meena Jagadeesan, Nikhil Garg, and Jacob Steinhardt.
    NeurIPS 2023.
    [paper] [talk] [slides] [poster]

  • Competition, Alignment, and Equilibria in Digital Marketplaces
    Meena Jagadeesan, Michael I. Jordan, and Nika Haghtalab.
    AAAI 2023.
    [paper] [slides] [poster]

  • Performative Power
    (α-β) Moritz Hardt, Meena Jagadeesan, and Celestine Mendler-Dünner.
    NeurIPS 2022.
    [paper] [talk] [slides] [poster] [MAIEI blog]

  • Regret Minimization with Performative Feedback
    Meena Jagadeesan, Tijana Zrnic, and Celestine Mendler-Dünner.
    ICML 2022. (Preliminary version at FORC 2022.)
    [paper] [slides] [talk]

  • Inductive Bias of Multi-Channel Linear Convolutional Networks with Bounded Weight Norm
    Meena Jagadeesan, Ilya Razenshteyn, and Suriya Gunasekar.
    COLT 2022.
    [paper] [slides] [talk at MIT]

  • Individual Fairness in Advertising Auctions through Inverse Proportionality
    (α-β) Shuchi Chawla and Meena Jagadeesan.
    ITCS 2022. (Preliminary version at FORC 2021.)
    [paper] [talk] [slides]

  • Learning Equilibria in Matching Markets from Bandit Feedback
    Meena Jagadeesan*, Alexander Wei*, Yixin Wang, Michael I. Jordan, and Jacob Steinhardt.
    NeurIPS 2021. Spotlight Presentation.
    Full version in Journal of the ACM.
    [paper] [poster] [slides]

  • Alternative Microfoundations for Strategic Classification
    Meena Jagadeesan, Celestine Mendler-Dünner, and Moritz Hardt.
    ICML 2021.
    [paper] [talk] [slides] [poster]

  • Cosine: A Cloud-Cost Optimized Self-Designing Key-Value Storage Engine
    Subarna Chatterjee, Meena Jagadeesan, Wilson Qin, and Stratos Idreos.
    VLDB 2021.
    [paper]

  • Multi-Category Fairness in Sponsored Search Auctions
    Christina Ilvento*, Meena Jagadeesan*, and Shuchi Chawla.
    ACM FAT* 2020. (Preliminary version at EC 2019 Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good.)
    [paper] [slides] [talk]

  • Individual Fairness in Pipelines
    (α-β) Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, and Meena Jagadeesan.
    FORC 2020.
    [paper] [full version] [slides from reading group]

  • Understanding Sparse JL for Feature Hashing
    Meena Jagadeesan.
    NeurIPS 2019. Oral Presentation.
    [paper] [full version] [talk] [slides] [coverage]

  • Simple Analysis of Sparse, Sign-Consistent JL
    Meena Jagadeesan.
    RANDOM 2019.
    [paper] [full version] [slides]

  • Varying the Number of Signals in Matching Markets
    Meena Jagadeesan* and Alexander Wei*.
    WINE 2018. (Preliminary version at EC 2018 Workshop on Frontiers of Market Design.)
    [paper] [full version]

  • Dyson's partition ranks and their multiplicative extensions
    (α-β) Elaine Hou and Meena Jagadeesan.
    The Ramanujan Journal, 2018.
    [paper]

  • Mobius Polynomials of Face Posets of Convex Polytopes
    Meena Jagadeesan and Susan Durst.
    Communications in Algebra, 2016.
    [paper]
Short papers
  • Recommender Systems as Dynamical Systems: Interactions with Viewers and Creators
    (α-β) Sarah Dean, Evan Dong, Meena Jagadeesan, and Liu Leqi.
    AAAI 2024 Recommendation Ecosystems Workshop (4-Page Extended Abstract).
    [short paper]

  • From Worst-Case to Average-Case Analysis: Accurate Latency Predictions for Key-Value Storage Engines
    Meena Jagadeesan* and Garrett Tanzer*.
    SIGMOD 2020 (2-Page Extended Abstract). Winner of SIGMOD SRC.
  • [short paper]

Theses

  • The Performance of Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transforms: Beyond the Classical Framework
    Meena Jagadeesan.
    Undergraduate thesis, 2020. Awarded Hoopes Prize.
    [thesis]

Selected Awards

Contact Info

Email: mjagadeesan [at] berkeley [dot] edu

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