A researcher at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris receives an ERC Advanced grant

17 Jun. 2025

Arnak Dalalyan is a professor at the ENSAE Paris and director of the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST*). He has just received a grant from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced) worth €1.6 million to carry out the SAGMOS (Statistical Analysis of Generative Models: Sampling Guarantees and Robustness) project. This project focuses on the statistical analysis of current generative AI models, particularly the quantification of their accuracy. It will contribute to the theoretical understanding of automatic generation models, which could have numerous implications in terms of technological innovation.

A researcher at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris receives an ERC Advanced grant

Find out more about the work of Arnak Dalalyan, professor at ENSAE and director of the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST).

About the ERC

The ERC, created by the European Union in 2007, is Europe's leading funding body for excellence in exploratory research. It funds creative researchers of all nationalities and ages to carry out projects across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant programs: Starting Grants, Consolidation Grants, Advanced Grants, and Synergy Grants. ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they are already established research leaders with a recognised track record of research achievements.

With its additional Proof of Concept grant program, the ERC helps recipients bridge the gap between their pioneering research and the early stages of commercialization. The ERC is governed by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Since November 2021, Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC. The ERC's overall budget for the period 2021-2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe program, under the responsibility of the European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, Ekaterina Zaharieva.

About Arnak Dalalyan

Arnak Dalalyan is now recognized as one of the world's leading experts in statistics applied to artificial intelligence. A graduate of Yerevan State University (Armenia), Arnak Dalalyan continued his studies in France, where he defended a thesis in statistics at the University of Le Mans in 2001, followed by a HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches, or accreditation to supervise research) at Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC) in 2007. After a post-doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin, he became a lecturer at UPMC, then a professor at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées. He then joined ENSAE Paris and CREST, becoming its director in 2020. Arnak Dalalyan's research focuses on high-dimensional statistics, diffusion process statistics, and statistical learning theory. He is currently deputy editor-in-chief of the Annals of Statistics, Bernoulli, Statistical Inference for Stochastic Processes, and the Journal of the Japan Statistical Society. He also regularly serves on the program committees of the COLT, ALT, ICML, and NeurIPS machine learning conferences. He was a member of the Bernoulli Society Council (2017-2021). Since 2014, Arnak Dalalyan has also been responsible for ENSAE's graduate program in statistics and machine learning.

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*CREST :a joint research unit CNRS, École Polytechnique, GENES, ENSAE Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 91120 Palaiseau, France