Tianjiao Ding

PhD Student • Innovation in Data Engineering and Science (IDEAS)University of Pennsylvania Email: tjding@upenn.edu

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Hi there! I am a PhD candidate at University of Pennsylvania, advised by René Vidal. I work closely with Benjamin D. Haeffele and Yi Ma. Prior to my PhD, I was a research assistant at ShanghaiTech University, advised by Manolis C. Tsakiris and collaborating with Laurent Kneip. I received a master’s degree in applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelor’s in computer science with honor from ShanghaiTech.

My research interests center on theoretical foundations of machine learning and emerging applications. On one hand, I use mathematics to understand when and why existing empirical paradigms work. On the other hand, these insights allow me to develop practical algorithms that are more robust, trustworthy, and efficient. As such, my work typically involves theory, controlled simulations, and large-scale applications.

I am on the 2026 job market. Happy to chat if you see a good fit for your lab, organization, or institute! You may view my CV and papers clustered by keywords.

Reaching out to me

I am glad to chat about research, advising, collaborations, life, and fun.

Undergraduate and MS students: If you are interested in doing research with me, feel free to contact me. The recommended time investment is at least 15 hours per week. Students I have mentored have gone on to PhD programs at UC Berkeley, Hong Kong University, MIT, NYU, and to full-time roles at Google and Meta.

Updates

Jan 2026 I am honored to receive the Penn AI Fellowship and CPAL Rising Stars Award!
Feb 2025 One paper accepted to ICLR ‘25 as a Spotlight paper!
Sep 2024 Two papers accepted to NeurIPS ‘24 (Vancouver)!

Papers

  1. SPM26-low-rank.png
    An Overview of Low-Rank Structures in the Training and Adaptation of Large Models
    Laura BalzanoTDBenjamin D. Haeffele, Soo Min Kwon, Qing Qu, Peng Wang, Zhangyang Wang, and Can Yaras
    To appear in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2026
    Invited paper for Special Issue on Mathematics of Deep Learning
  2. arXiv-colan.png
    Concept Lancet: Image Editing with Compositional Representation Transplant
    In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2025
  3. arXiv-tost.png
    Token Statistics Transformer: Linear-Time Attention via Variational Rate Reduction
    Ziyang WuTD*, Yifu Lu*Druv Pai, Jingyuan Zhang, Weida Wang, Yaodong YuYi Ma, and Benjamin D. Haeffele
    In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025
  4. NeurIPS24-pace.png
    PaCE: Parsimonious Concept Engineering for Large Language Models
    In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
  5. Neurips24-manifold-clustering.png
    Geometric Analysis of Nonlinear Manifold Clustering
    In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
  6. ICLR24-mlc-clip.png
    Image Clustering via the Principle of Rate Reduction in the Age of Pretrained Models
    In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024
  7. CPAL24-hard.gif
    HARD: Hyperplane ARrangement Descent
    TD*Liangzu Peng*, and René Vidal
    In Conference on Parsimony and Learning, 2024
  8. OpenReview23-or2.png
    Outlier-Robust Orthogonal Regression on Manifolds
    TD*Liangzu Peng*, and René Vidal
    In OpenReview, 2023
  9. ICCV23-mcr2-clustering.png
    Unsupervised Manifold Linearizing and Clustering
    In International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023
  10. ICML22-doubly-stochastic-clustering.png
    Understanding Doubly Stochastic Clustering
    In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022
  11. CVPR22-mcr2-variational.png
    Efficient Maximal Coding Rate Reduction by Variational Forms
    In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022
  12. arXiv21-boosting.png
    Boosting RANSAC via Dual Principal Component Pursuit
    Yunchen Yang, Xinyue Zhang, TDDaniel P. RobinsonRené Vidal, and Manolis C. Tsakiris
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.02918, 2021
  13. CVPR20-dpcp-homo.gif
    Robust Homography Estimation via Dual Principal Component Pursuit
    In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2020
  14. ICML19-dpcp.png
    Noisy Dual Principal Component Pursuit
    In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2019
  15. CVPR18-wireframe.jpg
    Learning to Parse Wireframes in Images of Man-Made Environments
    Kun Huang, Yifan WangZihan ZhouTDShenghua Gao, and Yi Ma
    In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2018