About Me

I am a research scientist at Meta. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had the privilege of being co-advised by Professors Jelena Diakonikolas and Stephen Wright. I received my B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Hong Kong in 2020, where I completed my senior thesis under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoming Yuan. I spent a wonderful summer at UCLA in 2019 working with Prof. Ernest Ryu.

Research

I am currently working on recommendation systems. My doctoral research was at the intersection of optimization and computational learning theory, where I developed algorithms that guarantee various forms of robustness.

Here is a list of my publications:

• Distributionally Robust Optimization with Adversarial Data Contamination
  Shuyao Li, Ilias Diakonikolas, Jelena Diakonikolas
  [arXiv]

• Learning a Single Neuron Robustly to Distributional Shifts and Adversarial Label Noise
  Shuyao Li*, Sushrut Karmalkar*, Ilias Diakonikolas, Jelena Diakonikolas
  In Proc. NeurIPS 2024 [arXiv]

• Robust Second-Order Nonconvex Optimization and Its Application to Low Rank Matrix Sensing
  Shuyao Li, Yu Cheng, Ilias Diakonikolas, Jelena Diakonikolas, Rong Ge, Stephen Wright
  In Proc. NeurIPS 2023 [arXiv]

• A Randomized Algorithm for Nonconvex Minimization With Inexact Evaluations and Complexity Guarantees
  Shuyao Li, Stephen Wright
  Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications (JOTA) [arXiv]
  
  

Misc

Selected awards:

• NeurIPS 2023 Scholar Award
• IFDS RAship (Spring 2022)
• UW Madison CS Departmental Research Fellowship (Fall 2020–Spring 2021)
• Outstanding Winner at Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM 2017)