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/high performance 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/Transcripts if you are interested. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted for online interviews.

news

Sep 18, 2025 Our paper HPR-LP: An implementation of an HPR method for solving linear programming has been accepted for publication at Mathematical Programming Computation! :tada: The open source solver can be found at Github.
Sep 10, 2025 Our survey paper A Survey on Large Language Model-based Agents for Statistics and Data Science has been accepted for publication at The American Statistician! :tada:
Jul 04, 2025 Our new manuscript HPR-QP has been posted on arXiv. Please find the open source HPR-QP solver at our Github repository!
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:
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: Open source code can be found at Github.

selected publications

  1. MPC
    HPR-LP: An implementation of an HPR method for solving linear programming
    Kaihuang Chen , Defeng Sun , Yancheng Yuan, Guojun Zhang , and Xinyuan Zhao
    Mathematical Programming Computation (accepted), 2025
    HTML Code
  2. 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, 2025
    HTML
  3. arXiv
    Accelerating RLHF Training with Reward Variance Increase
    Zonglin Yang , Zhexuan Gu , Houduo Qi , and Yancheng Yuan
    arXiv:2505.23247, 2025
    arXiv
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  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