About Me

I am a Machine Learning Scientist at TikTok, working on livestream recommendation ranking and retrieval. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin - Madison advised by Prof. Yingyu Liang and Prof. Robert D. Nowak. I obtained my B.A. degree in Statistics and Economics from Cornell University, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Madeleine Udell, Prof. Jacob Bien and Prof. Sumanta Basu.

My current interests lie in personalization, large language models, and recommendation systems — in particular, how foundation models can adapt to personalized preferences using cross-user and cross-modal signals. I am also interested in the theoretical and empirical aspects of model adaptation, with robustness, security, and alignment as key design concerns. Previously I worked on alignment for creative generation tasks, the theory of retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning, and algorithms for tensor decomposition.

For more detailed information about me, please check out my CV.

You can find the full list of my publications and manuscripts here.

Email: yguo [AT] cs.wisc.edu

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Sciences, 2018 - 2025, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Thesis: Model Adaptation with Applications in Adversarial Robustness and Large Language Models
• M.S. in Computer Sciences, 2018 - 2021, University of Wisconsin - Madison
• B.A. in Statistics & Economics, 2014 - 2018, Cornell University, Summa Cum Laude

Experiences

• TikTok (June. 2025 - Present)
  Machine Learning Scientist, San Jose, CA
  Livestream recommendation ranking and retrieval

• Amazon Inc. (June. 2023 - Aug. 2023)
  Applied Scientist Intern, Seattle, WA
  Hosted by Kathleen Champion

• Alibaba Inc., Damo Academy (Sept. 2022 - Jan. 2023)
  Research Scientist Intern, Bellevue, WA
  Hosted by Bolin Ding

• Amazon Inc. (June. 2022 - Aug. 2022)
  Applied Scientist Intern, Seattle, WA
  Hosted by Michael Dillon

Services

Journal:

• Reviewer: SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications

Conferences:

• Program Committee: AAAI, ICLR
• Reviewer: ICML, Neurips, ICLR, ICDE