Lai TIAN
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Lai Tian ( |
) About Me
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at ISE of USC Viterbi working with Prof. Johannes O. Royset. Before relocating to Los Angeles, I spent four wonderful years in Hong Kong and received my Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where I was advised by Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So.
My research interests lie in the intersection of mathematical optimization and computer science, with a particular emphasis on applications in modern machine learning. Recently, I have been especially focused on the computational and theoretical aspects of various approximation techniques in nonsmooth optimization and variational analysis.
What's New?
[Jan, 2025] Presented our work on verifying whether \(0\in\partial f(x)\) at SODA’25, New Orleans. [slides]
Selected Recent Works [Google Scholar]
Testing Approximate Stationarity Concepts for Piecewise Affine Functions
Lai Tian, Anthony Man-Cho So
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2025. [SIAM] [pdf] [slides]
No Dimension-Free Deterministic Algorithm Computes Approximate Stationarities of Lipschitzians
Lai Tian, Anthony Man-Cho So
Mathematical Programming, Series A, 2024. [SpringerLink] [pdf]
On the Finite-Time Complexity and Practical Computation of Approximate Stationarity Concepts of Lipschitz Functions
Lai Tian, Kaiwen Zhou, Anthony Man-Cho So
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022. [pdf]
Computing D-Stationary Points of \(\rho\)-Margin Loss SVM
Lai Tian, Anthony Man-Cho So
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2022. [pdf] [code]
Learning Feature Sparse Principal Subspace
Lai Tian, Feiping Nie, Rong Wang, Xuelong Li
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020. [pdf] [code]
Professional Service
Review for Journals:
Mathematical Programming
SIAM Journal on Optimization
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Journal of Global Optimization
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Review for Conferences:
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020–2025
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2020–2025
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021–2025
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2022, 2023, 2025
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2020, 2021, 2022
NeurIPS Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning (OPT) 2024
