Publications

My full publications list is on Google Scholar. (Due to the possibility of making minor updates to the published version on arXiv, please refer to the following links on my homepage for the latest version of my publications if you are interested in them)

Note that ¹ denotes equal contributions.

Recent Preprints

• Lesi Chen, Chengchang Liu, Luo Luo, and Jingzhao Zhang, Computationally Faster Newton Methods by Lazy Evaluations , arXiv preprint, 2025. [paper]

• Lesi Chen¹, Yaohua Ma¹, and Jingzhao Zhang, Near-Optimal Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with Fully First-Order Oracles , arXiv preprint, 2023. [paper]

Selected Publications

1. Lesi Chen¹, Chengchang Liu¹, and Jingzhao Zhang, Second-Order Min-Max Optimization with Lazy Hessians, in International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025 (Oral). [paper]

2. Lesi Chen and Luo Luo, Near-Optimal Algorithms for Making the Gradient Small in Stochastic Minimax Optimization, Journal of Machine Learning (JMLR), 2024. [paper]

3. Huaqing Zhang¹, Lesi Chen¹, Jing Xu, and Jingzhao Zhang, Functionally Constrained Algorithm Solves Convex Simple Bilevel Problems, in Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024. [paper]

4. Lesi Chen¹, Jing Xu¹, and Jingzhao Zhang, On Finding Small Hyper-Gradients in Bilevel Optimization: Hardness Results and Improved Analysis, in Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), 2024. [paper]

5. Lesi Chen, Jing Xu, and Luo Luo, Faster Gradient-Free Algorithms for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization, in International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023. [paper]

6. Lesi Chen, Boyuan Yao, and Luo Luo, Faster Stochastic Algorithms for Minimax Optimization under Polyak-Łojasiewicz Condition, in Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022. [paper]