Taoli Zheng

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Deep Learning Theory Team at RIKEN AIP, where I am very fortunate to work with Prof. Taiji Suzuki. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So, to whom I am deeply grateful for his guidance and support. During my Ph.D, from September 2024 to January 2025, I also had the privilege of visiting the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at 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

• Optimal Deterministic First-Order Oracle Complexity for Nonconvex-Concave Minimax Optimization
  Siyu Pan, Taoli Zheng, and Jiajin Li.

• Last-Iterate Convergence of Single-Loop Stochastic Methods for Constrained Convex-Concave Minimax Problems [NeurIPS 2026]
  Taoli Zheng, Jiajin Li, and Anthony Man-Cho So.

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

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

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
• [Oct, 2025] NeurIPS Top Reviewer

Services

Review for Journals:

• Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
• Mathematics of Operations Research (MOR)
• IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (TSP)
• Mathematical Programming (MP)
• Optimization Methods and Software

Review for Conferences:

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

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.