Zirui Yan

Ph.D. candidate in
Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

yanz11@rpi.edu

Address: 110 8th Street, Troy, New York, 12180

Bio

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Electrical, Computer, and System Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), working under the supervision of Prof. Ali Tajer. Before that, I obtained my B.S. in Statistics and dual degree in Computer Science from University of Science and Technology of China in 2020.

My current research topic is causal bandit (see this github repo for brief summary) and the causality in Large Language models (LLM). I also have broad interests in the application of bandit in federated learning.

Experience

  • Reviewer of ICML 2025
  • Reviewer of TMLR 2025
  • Reviewer of ICLR 2025
  • Reviewer of NuerIPS 2024
  • Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
  • Reviewer of Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024
  • Reviewer of Artificial Intelligence and Statistics Conference (AISTATS) 2024
  • Reviewer of ICML 2023 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling (SPIGM)

Publications

NeurIPS

Linear Causal Bandits: Unknown Graph and Soft Interventions

Zirui Yan, Ali Tajer

Proc. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

Paper
ISIT

Improved Bound for Robust Causal Bandits with Linear Models

Zirui Yan, Arpan Mukherjee, Burak Varıcı, Ali Tajer

Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2024.

Paper
AISTATS

Causal Bandits with General Causal Models and Interventions

Zirui Yan, Dennis Wei, Dmitriy Katz-Rogozhnikov, Prasanna Sattigeri, Ali Tajer

Proc. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2024.

Paper
JSAIT

Robust Causal Bandits for Linear Models

Zirui Yan, Arpan Mukherjee, Burak Varıcı, Ali Tajer

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT), 2024.

Paper
TON

Optimizing Parameter Mixing under Constrained Communications in Parallel Federated Learning

Xuezheng Liu*, Zirui Yan*, Yipeng Zhou , Di Wu , Xu Chen , Jessie Hui Wang (* equal contributor)

IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking (TON), 2023.

Paper
ICASSP

Federated Multi-armed Bandit via Uncoordinated Exploration

Zirui Yan, Quan Xiao, Tianyi Chen, Ali Tajer

Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)/strong>, 2022.

Paper
WACV

Image denoising via K-SVD with primal-dual active set algorithm

Quan Xiao, Canhong Wen, Zirui Yan

Proc. Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020.

Paper
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