Yancheng Yuan

PaulYuan.jpg

Office: TU 821

PolyU

Hong Kong SAR, China

I am an Assistant Professor in Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I also serve as an Assistant Director of Research Center for Intelligent Operations Research and an Associate Director (Research and Development Management) of CITIC-PolyU Interdisciplinary Mathematical Digital AI Joint Laboratory (AIJLab). I was an Assistant Professor (2024.07 – 2025.02) in Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Before joining PolyU, I was a research fellow in NExT Research Center , School of Computing, National University of Singapore, working with Prof. Tat-Seng CHUA.

I obtained my PhD in Mathematics, from Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore in 2020. My Ph.D supervisor is Prof. Kim-Chuan TOH. I was fortunately supervised by Prof. Defeng SUN from 2015 to 2018. Prior to NUS, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computational Mathematics from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2015, where I was supervised by Prof. Juyong ZHANG.

Contact: X + Y, where X = yancheng.yuan, Y = @polyu.edu.hk

Openings :

  1. I am looking for highly self-motivated PhD students and postdoctoral fellows with foundation models/optimization/scientific computing/statistics backgrounds to join our research group.
  2. I am looking for Research Engineers and Research Assistants with backgrounds in LLMs/Scientific Computing to join our research group.

Please feel free to send me an email with your CV if you are interested.

news

Jul 04, 2025 Our new manuscript HPR-QP has been posted on arXiv. The open source HPR-QP solver will be made public soon!
Jul 01, 2025 An open source HOT solver for the optimal transport problem is made public at Github. Please click here for the source codes of our solver.
Jun 28, 2025 Our paper “Randomly Projected Convex Clustering Model: Motivation, Realization, and Cluster Recovery Guarantees” has been accepted for publication at Journal of Machine Learning Research! :tada:
Jun 27, 2025 One paper gets accepted for publication at ICCV 2025! :tada:
May 18, 2025 Our paper LAMBDA: A Large Model Based Data Agent has been accepted for publication at Journal of the American Statistical Association! :tada:
Apr 16, 2025 Our paper HOT: An efficient Halpern accelerating algorithm for optimal transport problems has been accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence! :tada:

selected publications

  1. JMLR
    Randomly Projected Convex Clustering Model: Motivation, Realization, and Cluster Recovery Guarantees
    Ziwen Wang , Yancheng Yuan, Jiaming Ma , Tieyong Zeng , and Defeng Sun
    Journal of Machine Learning Research (accepted), 2025
    PDF
  2. arXiv
    Accelerating RLHF Training with Reward Variance Increase
    Zonglin Yang , Zhexuan Gu , Houduo Qi , and Yancheng Yuan
    arXiv:2505.23247, 2025
    arXiv
  3. JASA
    LAMBDA: A Large Model Based Data Agent
    Maojun Sun , Ruijian Han , Binyan Jiang , Houduo Qi , Defeng Sun , Yancheng Yuan, and Jian Huang
    Journal of the American Statistical Association (accepted), 2025
    arXiv HTML Code
  4. TPAMI
    HOT: An Efficient Halpern Accelerating Algorithm for Optimal Transport Problems
    Guojun Zhang , Zhexuan Gu , Yancheng Yuan, and Defeng Sun
    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (accepted), 2025
    arXiv Code
  5. MPC
    Adaptive sieving: A dimension reduction technique for sparse optimization problems
    Yancheng Yuan, Meixia Lin , Defeng Sun , and Kim-Chuan Toh
    Mathematical Programming Computation (accepted), 2025
    arXiv HTML Code
  6. SIOPT
    Accelerating Preconditioned ADMM via Degenerate Proximal Point Mappings
    Defeng Sun , Yancheng Yuan, Guojun Zhang , and Xinyuan Zhao
    SIAM Journal on Optimization (accepted), 2025
    arXiv
  7. ICLR
    A Tight Convergence Analysis of Inexact Stochastic Proximal Point Algorithm for Stochastic Composite Optimization Problems
    Shulan Zhu , Chenglong Bao , Defeng Sun , and Yancheng Yuan
    The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (Accepted), 2025
    HTML
  8. SIOPT
    An Efficient Sieving based Secant Method for Sparse Optimization Problems with Least-squares Constraints
    Qian Li , Defeng Sun , and Yancheng Yuan
    SIAM Journal on Optimization, 2024
    HTML
  9. ICML
    Collective Certified Robustness against Graph Injection Attacks
    Yuni Lai , Bailin Pan , Kaihuang Chen , Yancheng Yuan, and Kai Zhou
    Proceedings of the 41th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024
    HTML
  10. SIGIR
    LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant
    Jiayi Liao , Sihang Li , Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Yancheng Yuan, Xiang Wang , and Xiangnan He
    The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2024
    Best Paper Award Finalist HTML Code
  11. NeurIPS
    Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion
    Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Zhicai Wang , Yancheng Yuan, Xiang Wang , and Xiangnan He
    The 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023
    HTML Code
  12. SIOPT
    A Dimension Reduction Technique for Large-Scale Structured Sparse Optimization Problems with Application to Convex Clustering
    Yancheng Yuan, Tsung-Hui Chang , Defeng Sun , and Kim-Chuan Toh
    SIAM Journal on Optimization, 2022
    HTML
  13. JMLR
    Convex Clustering: Model, Theoretical Guarantee and Efficient Algorithm
    Defeng Sun , Kim-Chuan Toh , and Yancheng Yuan
    Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2021
    HTML Code