• Assistant Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering
Google Scholar Profile
Yan Li

Educational Background

  • B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Nankai University, 2016
  • B.B.A. in Accounting, Nankai University, 2016
  • M.S. in Statistics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018
  • Ph.D. in Operations Research, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024

Research Interests

    • Dynamic optimization (Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning)
    • Robust optimization
    • Stochastic optimization  

Awards & Honors

  • Alice and John Jarvis Ph.D. Student Research Award
  • The Margaret and Stephen Kendrick Research Excellence Award
  • ISyE Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

Selected Publications

  • Policy Mirror Descent Inherently Explores Action Space, SIAM Journal on Optimization (forthcoming), 2024
  • Block Policy Mirror Descent, SIAM Journal on Optimization, 2023
  • Homotopic Policy Mirror Descent: Policy Convergence, Implicit Regularization, and Improved Sample Complexity, Mathematical Programming, 2023
  • Frequency-aware SGD for Efficient Embedding Learning with Provable Benefits, 2022
  • Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent based Adversarial Training on Separable Data, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020
Google Scholar Profile