About

I am an assistant professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, followed by a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in Statistics and Data Science at Wharton.

Research interests

My research interests touch on a broad range of topics in machine learning, algorithms, large-scale networks, with connections to operations research and optimization. The main goal of my lab is to advance the foundations of machine learning. Much of our recent work focus on understanding the structures of large neural network models, and use this improved understanding to design faster algorithms for downstream tasks and applications. For more information, please check out the research overview page and my CV.

I enjoy working on technically challenging problems, while striving for broader impacts by 1) advancing the scientific frontier to benefit the society, and 2) fostering a positive environment to support the next generation of engineers and researchers. I support accessible and reproducible research.

Recent updates

New, revised paper on a synthetic benchmark evaluation of algorithmic reasoning using GNNs and transformer models!
Talk slides about our recent line of work on a Hessian view of supervised fine-tuning, task attribution, and RL.
New paper on efficient kernel methods for language model and data attribution.
A new paper using a self-normalization estimator for matrix completion from very sparse observations.
A list of older logs.

Recent professional services

Area Chair: NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, AISTATS, and AAAI.

Action Editor: Transactions on Machine Learning Research, Journal of Data-Centric Machine Learning Research.

Session Organizer: INFORMS.

Reviewer and Panelist: Journal of Machine Learning Research; National Science Foundation.