Tianyi Lin
Welcome to my homepage!
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia University. My research interests lie in optimization and machine learning, game theory, social and economic network, and optimal transport.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where I was advised by Professor Michael I. Jordan and was associated with the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) group. From 2023 to 2024, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Professor Asuman Ozdaglar. Prior to that, I received a B.S. in Mathematics from Nanjing University, a M.S. in Pure Mathematics and Statistics from University of Cambridge and a M.S. in Operations Research from UC Berkeley.
Email: tl3335 [at] columbia [dot] edu
Office: 535B Mudd Building, 500 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027
Prospective students: I am unable to respond to most inquiries regarding openings for graduate and postdoctoral positions in my group. Admissions to Columbia University are handled at a department-wide level, not by me individually. If you have been admitted to Columbia University, please feel free to contact me.
news
| Feb 03, 2026 | The paper, Reward-free alignment for conflicting objectives, coauthored with Peter Chen, Xiaopeng Li and Xi Chen was posted to ArXiv. |
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| Jan 26, 2026 | The paper, Exploration vs exploitation: Rethinking RLVR through clipping, entropy, and spurious reward, coauthored with Peter Chen, Xiaopeng Li, Ziniu Li, Wotao Yin and Xi Chen was accepted to ICLR 2026. |
| Sep 18, 2025 | The paper, ComPO: Preference alignment via comparison oracles, coauthored with Peter Chen, Xi Chen and Wotao Yin was accepted to NeurIPS 2025. |