Taoli Zheng

About Me

I am a fifth-year Ph.D student in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So. From September 2024 to January 2025, I was a visiting Ph.D student in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization form the University of Waterloo, supervised by Prof. Stephen A. Vavasis and Prof. Henry Wolkowicz. Before that, I received my bachelor degree in Statistics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2020. My research involves developing algorithms for structured nonconvex problems and provide theoretical analysis for them.

Publication/Preprint

• Doubly smoothed optimistic gradients: A universal approach for smooth minimax problems
  Taoli Zheng, Anthony Man-Cho So, and Jiajin Li.

• Single-Loop Variance-Reduced Stochastic Algorithm for Nonconvex-Concave Minimax Optimization [ICASSP 2025 (Oral)]
  Xia Jiang, Linglingzhi Zhu, Taoli Zheng, Anthony Man-Cho So.

• Universal Gradient Descent Ascent Method for Nonconvex-Nonconcave Minimax Optimization [NeurIPS 2023]
  Taoli Zheng, Linglingzhi Zhu, Anthony Man-Cho So, José Blanchet, Jiajin Li.

• A Linearly Convergent Algorithm for Rotationally Invariant $\ell_1$-Norm Principal Component Analysis
  Taoli Zheng, Peng Wang, and Anthony Man-Cho So.

• Sparse high-order portfolios via proximal DCA and SCA [ICASSP 2021]
  Jinxin Wang, Zengde Deng, Taoli Zheng, Anthony Man-Cho So.

Awards

• [Oct. 2023] NeurIPS 2023 Scholar Award
• [May. 2023] CUHK Reaching Out Award
• [Apr. 2023] Student Travel Award of SIAM OP23
• [July. 2020- July. 2024] CUHK Postgraduate Student Scholarship

Services

Reviewers for

• Transactions on Machine Learning Research
• International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2024, 2025
• Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024, 2025
• International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025

Teaching Assistant

• SEEM3630 Service Management (Instructor: Dr. HO, Sin Cheung), 2023 fall.
• SEEM2440 Engineering Economics (Instructor: Prof. Dohyun Ahn), 2022 fall, 2023 fall.
• ENGG 5501 Foundations of Optimization (Instructor: Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So), 2022 fall.
• ESTR 2004 Discrete Mathematics for Engineers (ELITE Stream) (Instructor: Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So), 2021 fall.
• ENGG1120B Linear Algebra for Engineers (Instructor: Dr. Chi-Kong NG), 2021 spring, 2022 spring.
• ENGG2440B Discrete Mathematics for Engineers (Instructor: Prof. Hoi-To Wai), 2020 fall.