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Research Overview - by PI

My research is driven by low-dimensional principles of intelligence, seeking the foundational blueprints that enable scalable, generalizable AI. This perspective (see a "philosophical" piece I wrote for the CPAL conference) has guided my work across many domains, aiming to move beyond brute-force scaling toward more structured and principled learning systems.

 

At the university level, we have recently focused on how training dynamics can inherently discover low-dimensional inductive biases, such as sparsity, low-rank manifolds, and algebraic symmetries, shaping more efficient paradigms for pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. We further study how these structures manifest at test time as self-organized, compositional mechanisms that support inference, reasoning, and agentic planning. Finally, we are interested in how such structural invariants translate into real-world deployment, enabling resource-aware and trustworthy AI in high-stakes domains.

 

Historically, my work has included deep learning theory, learning-augmented optimization, sparse coding & inverse problems, and visual restoration & understanding — areas in which I remain (somehow) engaged.

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In parallel, my industry experiences have opened several new, distinct research directions inspired by practical deployments and large-scale systems: geometry deep learning and graphs (with Amazon),  video generation (with Picsart), and foundation model training for trading (with XTX Markets)

University Research

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Training Dynamics with Low-Dimensional Inductive BIas.
pre-training, SFT, & RL
Test-Time Behaviors with Efficiently Self-Organized and Composite Mechanisms. 
inference, reasoning, & agentic planning
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High-Stakes Real-World Deployment.
robotics, medicine, & more

Past Research Trajectory

/ 2022-2024

Theoretical properties of sparse neural networks and transformers

Selected work: [ICLR 2025], [NeurIPS 2024], [JMLR 2024a], [JMLR 2024b]

/ 2016-2021

"Learning-to-optimize" algorithms with theoretical guarantees

Selected work: [JMLR 2022], [ICLR 2022], [ICLR 2019], [NeurIPS 2018]

/ 2016-2021

Image and video generative models for restoration and enhancement

Selected work:

[IEEE TIP 2021] (IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award 2024)

[NeurIPS 2021] (covered by Quanta Magazine)
[ICCV 2019] (Implemented by many open-source toolboxs)

/ 2012-2019

Robust perception in visually degraded environments

Selected work: [IEEE TIP 2018], [ICCV 2017], [CVPR 2016]

/ 2010-2018

Compressive sensing, dictionary learning, and low-rank representations

Selected work: [NeurIPS 2018], [AAAI 2016]

My students often pursue broader research interests than myself, reflecting diverse perspectives within VITA group. I encourage exploring their own profiles for more details.

Industry Research

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01 / XTX Markets            (2024–present)

​Leading the development of large-scale foundation models for high-frequency trading data. We don't publish here :) 

02 / Picsart                  (2022–2024)

Directing the generative AI initiative and contributing influential open-source video generation models. Selected Work:

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03 / Amazon                                  (2021–2022)

Improving cold-start performance in recommendation systems for emerging retail markets using geometric deep learning. Selected Work:

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