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 interface between 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?
Honored and grateful to share that our work received the Best Paper Prize for Young Researchers at ICCOPT 2025!
Selected Recent Works [Google Scholar]
Approximating Rockafellians Mitigate Distributional Perturbations
L. Tian, J. O. Royset
Preprint, 2025. [arXiv]
Testing Approximate Stationarity Concepts for Piecewise Affine Functions
L. Tian, A. M.-C. So
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2025. [SIAM] [arXiv] [slides]
Best Paper Prize for Young Researchers in Continuous OptimizationNo Dimension-Free Deterministic Algorithm Computes Approximate Stationarities of Lipschitzians
L. Tian, A. M.-C. So
Mathematical Programming, Series A, 2024. [SpringerLink] [pdf]
On the Finite-Time Complexity and Practical Computation of Approximate Stationarity Concepts of Lipschitz Functions
L. Tian, K. Zhou, A. M.-C. So
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022. [pdf]
Computing D-Stationary Points of \(\rho\)-Margin Loss SVM
L. Tian, A. M.-C. So
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2022. [pdf] [code]
Learning Feature Sparse Principal Subspace
L. Tian, F. Nie, R. Wang, X. Li
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020. [pdf] [code]
Professional Service
Review for Journals:
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Journal of Global Optimization
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Mathematical Programming
Mathematics of Operations Research
SIAM Journal on Optimization
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
