Dingzhi Yu (余 定 之) M.Sc. student, LAMDA Group Supervisor: Professor Lijun Zhang Major: Computer Science and Technology School of Artificial Intelligence National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China Google Scholar

About Me

I am a second-year graduate student of School of Artificial Intelligence in Nanjing University and a member of LAMDA Group, led by Professor Zhi-Hua Zhou. Prior to that, I received my B.E. degree from School of Data Science, Fudan University in June 2024. Currently, I am a research intern at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, under the valued supervision of Professor Tong Zhang.

I work on the interplay between optimization theory and modern machine learning, with the current focus on:

1. designing efficient and scalable optimizers for pretraining and post-training of Large Language Models;


2. explaining the practical efficiency of optimization algorithms from a theoretical perspective.

Publication

1. Efficient Algorithms for Empirical Group Distributionally Robust Optimization and Beyond [PDF, Bibtex]
   Dingzhi Yu, Yunuo Cai, Wei Jiang, and Lijun Zhang
   In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024), pages 57384-57414, 2024.
   
   

Preprints

1. Sign-Based Optimizers Are Effective Under Heavy-Tailed Noise [arXiv, Code]
   Dingzhi Yu, Hongyi Tao, Yuanyu Wan, Luo Luo, and Lijun Zhang
   
   
2. Mirror Descent Under Generalized Smoothness [arXiv]
   Dingzhi Yu, Wei Jiang, Hongyi Tao, Yuanyu Wan, and Lijun Zhang
   
   
3. Improved Analysis for Sign-based Methods with Momentum Updates [arXiv]
   Wei Jiang, Dingzhi Yu, Sifan Yang, Wenhao Yang, and Lijun Zhang
   
   
4. Group Distributionally Robust Optimization with Flexible Sample Queries [arXiv]
   Haomin Bai, Dingzhi Yu, Shuai Li, Haipeng Luo, and Lijun Zhang
   
   
5. Improved Approximate Regret for Decentralized Online Continuous Submodular Maximization via Reductions [arXiv]
   Yuanyu Wan, Yu Shen, Dingzhi Yu, Bo Xue, and Mingli Song

Awards & Honors

• Xiaomi Outstanding Scholarship (Top-tier Award, ￥20,000), 2025
• Excellent Graduate Student of Nanjing University, 2024
• First-Class Academic Scholarship for Graduate Students (￥10,000), 2024

Academic Service

• Reviewer: ICLR 2025, 2026; ECAI 2025; BDU@NeurIPS 2024.

Correspondence

• Email: yudz@lamda.nju.edu.cn

• Address: National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Xianlin Campus Mailbox 603, 163 Xianlin Avenue, Qixia District, Nanjing 210023, China.