CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (GGAM), University of California, Davis, 2022
• B.S. in Mathematics and Physics, Colorado State University, 2013–2016
  • Minor in Computer Science
  • Honors Degree
  • Coca-Cola Full Scholarship (1 student among 7 985/211 Chinese universities per year)
• Mathematics, East China Normal University, 2011–2013

Experience

• 2022–present: Applied Scientist II, Amazon Store Foundational AI
  • Foundation models and large language models for shopping search, retrieval, and recommendation.
  • Reinforcement learning and policy optimization, LLM-based embeddings, generative recommenders, and small language model pre/mid/post-training.

Research Interests

• Reinforcement learning and policy optimization for large language models
• Stochastic optimization, especially zeroth-order optimization with variance reduction
• Zeroth-order min-max optimization in deterministic and stochastic settings

Publications

See the home page for the full list.