I am now a Ph.D. Candidate at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Department of Computer Science and Engineering from 2022, advised by Prof. Farzan Farnia.
I obtained my Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics and Information Engineering, a double-major program jointly offered by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), within the Honor Class ELITE Stream. It’s my pleasure to be kindly advised by Prof. Chandra Nair and Prof. Anthony MC So.
My research interests include Machine Learning Theory, Trustworthy AI (Robustness, Fairness, and Interpretability) and Diffusion-based Generative Models. I seek relevant applications in Computer Vision, Decision Making, and Planning.
🔥 News
- 2025.07: 🎉 Our paper is accepted by ACMMM 2025!
- 2025.06: 🎉 Join Huawei Hong Kong Research Center, Theory Lab as a research intern!
- 2025.01: 🎉 Our paper is accepted by AAAI 2025 GenPlan Workshop (Spotlight)!
- 2025.01: 🎉 Our paper is accepted by ICLR 2025!
- 2024.07: 🎉 Join Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab as a research intern!
- 2024.04: 🎉 Our paper is accepted by UAI 2024!
- 2022.08: 🎉 Start the journey as a Ph.D. student at CSE, CUHK!
- 2021.05: 🎉 Our paper is accepted by ICASSP 2021!
📖 Educations
- 2022.08 - 2026.07 (now): Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering Department, CUHK, Hong Kong SAR.
- 2017.09 - 2022.07: Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Information Engineering (double major), CUHK, Hong Kong SAR.
📝 Publications
pFedFair: Towards Optimal Group Fairness-Accuracy Trade-off in Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Haoyu Lei, Shizhan Gong, Qi Dou, Farzan Farnia
Paper/[Code]
- We Propose the pFedFair to address personalized federated learning under heterogeneous feature distribution, while applying image embeddings to improve the performance of group-fairness learning methods on computer vision datasets.
Boosting Generalization in Diffusion-Based Neural Combinatorial Solver via Energy-guided Sampling
Haoyu Lei, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Zhitang Chen, Farzan Farnia
Paper/[Code]
- We propose a general energy-guided sampling framework during inference time that enhances both the cross-scale and cross-problem generalization capabilities of diffusion-based NCO solvers without requiring additional training.
Boosting the visual interpretability of CLIP via adversarial fine-tuning
Shizhan Gong, Haoyu Lei, Qi Dou, Farzan Farnia
Paper/[Code]
- We propose an unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning (AFT) with norm-regularization to enhance the visual interpretability of CLIP.
On the Inductive Biases of Demographic Parity-based Fair Learning Algorithms
Haoyu Lei, Amin Gohari, Farzan Farnia
- We theoretically show that Inductive Biases widely exist in DP-based fair supervised learning algorithms, and further propose a distributionally robust optimization framework to mitigate the biases.
An Efficient Alternating Direction Method For Graph Learning From Smooth Signals
Xiaolu Wang, Chaorui Yao, Haoyu Lei, Anthony Man-Cho So
- We cast the graph learning formulation as a nonsmooth, strictly convex optimization problem and develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve it.
💻 Experiences
- 2025.06 - Now: Research intern, Huawei Hong Kong Research Center, Theory Lab, Hong Kong SAR, China
- 2024.07 - 2025.01: Research intern, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Decision Making & Reasoning Group, Shenzhen, China
- 2021.08 - 2022.04: Research Assistant, advised by Prof. Anthony MC So, Department of SEEM, CUHK, Hong Kong SAR
- 2021.05 - 2021.08：Research Assistant, advised by Prof. Eliza Mik, Department of Law, CUHK, Hong Kong SAR
- 2020.08 - 2020.12: Research Assistant, advised by Prof. Anthony MC So, Department of SEEM, CUHK, Hong Kong SAR
- 2019.01 - 2019.03: Financial Internship, Guotai Junan Securities, Hunan Changsha
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2022: Postgraduate Studentship Scholarship Scheme
- 2021: Chung Chi College Departmental Prize (Graduation Top 10%)
- 2019, 2021: Dean’s List (Academic Year Top 10%)
- 2019 - 2021: Chung Chi College Class Scholarship (College Top 10%)
- 2019 - 2021: ELITE Stream Scholarship
- 2017: Top 0.15% in Hunan Province’s Gaokao (University Entrance Exam)
⌨️ Languages and Skills
- Languages: English (Advanced), Cantonese (Intermediate), Putonghua (Native)
- Programming Skills: Python (Main), Pytorch (Main), Matlab, R, C, C++, C#, Julia, LaTeX
💬 Teaching
- 2023-24 Spring: CSCI5030 Machine Learning Theory (Postgraduate)
- 2023-24 Fall: ENGG2760A Probability for Engineers (Undergraduate)
- 2022-23 Spring: ENGG1003SG Digital Literacy and Computational Thinking (Undergraduate)
- 2022-23 Fall: AIST3010 Numerical Optimization (Undergraduate)