Lisha Chen

Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Goergen Insitute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
University of Rochester

E-mail: lishachen9577 [AT] gmail.com (preferred);
lisha.chen [AT] rochester.edu

           

About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester. I did my Ph.D. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), fortunate to be advised by Prof. Tianyi Chen (now at Cornell). I obtained my M.S. in Electrical Engineering from RPI in 2021, and my B.S. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 2017. My broad research interests include machine learning, optimization, and statistical signal processing. My current research focuses on the theory and applications of multi-objective learning and meta-learning.

I am always looking for highly motivated students. If you are interested, please check out more details here.

News

  • Sep 2026: Happy to give a talk at OSU ECE department seminar on our recent works for preference-guided multi-objective learning.

  • Aug 2026: I will present a tutorial at NeurIPS 2026. More information will be available soon.

  • Jul 2026: Two papers accepted by Asilomar 2026.

  • May 2026: Our new preprint on multi-objective optimization is out.
    SURF: Steering the Scalarization Weight to Uniformly Traverse the Pareto Front
    SURF studies how scalarization weights control the traversal speed along the Pareto front by analyzing the Pareto front geometry. Building on this, SURF proposes a geometry-guided weight sampling rule for uniform Pareto-front coverage. We apply the method to multi-objective RL and multi-objective LLM alignment.

  • Feb 2026: One paper accepted by ICASSP 2026 as oral. Congrats to Liuyuan Jiang!

  • Mar 2025: I have successfully defended my thesis. Sincere thanks to my committee members for their guidance and support.

  • Oct 2024: Honored and grateful to receive the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) scholarship.

  • Jul 2024: I co-organize a special session on "Advances in Optimization for Machine Learning and Signal Processing" at IEEE SAM 2024 Workshop with Prof. Tianyi Chen and Prof. Kaiyi Ji.

  • Apr 2024: I present a tutorial at ICASSP 2024 together with Prof. Tianyi Chen and Dr. Xiaodong Cui.

  • Feb 2024: I present a tutorial at AAAI 2024 together with Prof. Tianyi Chen and Prof. Zhuoran Yang.

  • Feb 2024: I am invited to give a talk at the University of Rochester ECE department seminar.

  • Dec 2023: Our paper is accepted by ICASSP 2024.
    Variance Reduction Can Improve Trade-off in Multi-Objective Learning

  • Oct 2023: I am honored to receive the Rensselaer's Founders Award of Excellence.

  • Feb 2023: I am honored to be selected as Top Reviewer for AISTATS 2023.