Yao Ji

H. Milton Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow

H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

When I'm Not Optimizing

🧗 Bouldering @ The Overlook Boulder + Fitness
🏃 Half Marathon 2:03:49 @ Monumental Half Marathon
💍 Wife of a talented ML engineer: Dr. Ruqi Bai
🐱 Mother of three naughty cats: Oreo, Dove, Doggy

About Me

I am an H. Milton Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Institute of Technology. My postdoctoral mentor is Prof. Guanghui (George) Lan.

I earned my Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University (2024). Prior to that, I received my B.S. (2016) and M.S. (2019) degrees in the School of Mathematical Sciences from Beijing Normal University.

Experience & Education

H. Milton Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow

Georgia Institute of Technology

Oct 2024 – Present

Research on parameter-free optimization, stochastic optimization, high order optimization, variational inequality, reinforcement learning and its application in health care.

Ph.D. in Operation Research

Purdue University

Aug 2019 – Sep 2024

Thesis: High-dimensional inference over networks: statistical and computational guarantees

M.S. in Probability and Stochastic Process

Beijing Normal University

Sep 2016 – Jun 2019

Thesis: Conditional Limit Theorem for Bellman-Harris Branching Process

B.S. in Mathematics and Statistics

Beijing Normal University

Sep 2012 – Jun 2016

Interests

Parameter-Free Optimization Variational Inequality Stochastic Optimization Gradient Minimization High Order Optimization Reinforcement Learning Reinforcement Learning in Health Care

Featured Publications

Yao Ji, Guanghui Lan (2026). Stochastic Auto-conditioned Fast Gradient Methods with Optimal Rates. arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06525.

PDF Slides (INFORMS OS 2026)

Yao Ji, Guanghui Lan (2025). High-Order Accumulative Regularization for Gradient Minimization in Convex Programming. arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03723.

PDF Slides (INFORMS 2025)

Yao Ji, Gesualdo Scutari, Ying Sun, Harsha Honnappa (2023). Distributed Sparse Regression via Penalization. Journal of Machine Learning Research.

PDF

Yao Ji, Gesualdo Scutari, Ying Sun, Harsha Honnappa (2023). Distributed (ATC) Gradient Descent for High Dimension Sparse Regression. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

PDF DOI

Presentations

Yao Ji, Guanghui Lan (2026). Stochastic Auto-conditioned Fast Gradient Methods with Optimal Rates. 2026 INFORMS Optimization Society Conference, Atlanta, GA — Talk.

Slides Paper