About Me
I am a Ph.D. student at the Department of Statistics, University of Michigan. My research focuses on the statistical foundations and evaluation of modern AI, particularly generative models.
I hold an M.A. in Statistics from UC Berkeley (courses) and an advanced degree in Mathematical Physics from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. I have worked in both the technology and financial industries in the time between my Physics and Statistics degrees.
I welcome inquiries at leban@umich.edu.
Education
M.A. Statistics, 2022
University of California, Berkeley
M.Sc. (equivalent) Mathematical Physics, 2016
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Recent Publications
(2026).
CausalDS: Benchmarking Causal Reasoning in Data-Science Agents.
arXiv preprint.
(2025).
Energy-Tweedie: Score meets Score, Energy meets Energy.
arXiv preprint.
(2025).
Distributional Autoencoders Know the Score.
NeurIPS 2025.
PDF Cite Code Poster Slides NeurIPS page OpenReview alphaXiv
(2023).
Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas.
Open Mind (MIT Press).
(2023).
Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference.
To appear in Royal Society Open Science.
