Hi! I am Yiyi Cai, a senior at Caltech, where I am studying electrical engineering. I am broadly interested in the interplay of theoretical computer science and quantum information, including quantum algorithms, coding theory, complexity theory, and cryptography. I hope to apply tools in TCS to discover relevant physical phenomena. In the past, I have worked on quantum error correction and quantum Gibbs sampling.

I will be pursuing a MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar starting in Fall 2025, followed by a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in Fall 2026. I am a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research fellow, and I am grateful to have been awarded the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, the NSF Graduate Student Fellowship, and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Selected Work

High-Temperature Fermionic Gibbs States are Mixtures of Gaussian States
Akshar Ramkumar, Yiyi Cai, Yu Tong, Jiaqing Jiang
arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09730

Stochastic Error Cancellation in Analog Quantum Simulation
Yiyi Cai, Yu Tong, John Preskill
Outstanding Paper Prize, 2024 Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC) Conference paper, talk