I am a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, fortunate to be advised by Prof. Kaiyi Ji. Before that, I received my M.S. in Statistics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(UIUC) in 2022 and my B.S. in Mathematics from Central South University(China) in 2020.

Research

I have been working at the intersection of optimization, machine learning and networked systems, mostly on the theory side. My major research focuses include:

Bilevel optimization and application in deep learning

Federated learning and communication networks

Large-scale stochastic optimization

Publications

05/2023: SimFBO: Towards Simple, Flexible and Communication-efficient Federated Bilevel Learning.

         Yifan Yang, Peiyao Xiao, Kaiyi Ji.
         Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023. (Spotlight, 3% Acceptance)

05/2023: Achieving O(\epsilon^{-1.5}) Complexity in Hessian-free Stochastic Bilevel Optimization.

         Yifan Yang, Peiyao Xiao, Kaiyi Ji.
         Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS) 2023.

Talks

Glad to give an invited talk at INFORMS 2024 (Rice University, Houston) about our recent progress on bilevel optimization. Many thanks to conference organizer Prof. Shiqian Ma and session organizer Dr. Jeongyeol Kwon.

Service

I served as a reviewer of:

Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR)

ICLR 2024 AGI Workshop

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology(TCSVT)

Teaching Experiences

I served as a teaching assistant of the following courses:

CSE676: Deep Learning (2024 Spring)

CSE431/531: Algorithm Analysis and Design (2023 Fall)

CSE460/560: Data Models and Query Languages (2023 Spring)