Yitong Qiu

About Me

I am an incoming Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia University. I received my B.S. in Mathematics from the School of the Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), as a member of the Hua Loo-Keng Talent Program in Mathematics.

My research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, applied probability, and optimization.

Research Interests

• Theoretical Machine Learning
• Diffusion Models
• Reinforcement Learning

Publications & Preprints

1. Ye He, Yitong Qiu, and Molei Tao.
   Diffusion Model’s Generalization Can Be Characterized by Inductive Biases toward a Data-Dependent Ridge Manifold.
   Preprint, 2026. [arXiv]
   Best Paper Award, FoGen Workshop at ICML 2026.

Education

• Columbia University, New York, NY
  Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, incoming Fall 2026

• University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
  School of the Gifted Young
  B.S. in Mathematics, Hua Loo-Keng Talent Program in Mathematics, 2022–2026
  

Selected Honors

• Outstanding Student Scholarship (First-Class), USTC, 2025
• Meritorious Winner (Top 10%), Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling, 2025
• Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition Finalist (Global Rank 109), 2024
• Excellent Teaching Assistant Award, USTC, 2024

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email at yq2463 (at) columbia.edu. You can also find me on GitHub.

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