How to understand gradient descent?
Gradient descent is a first-order iterative optimization algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function. To find a local minimum of a function using gradient descent, we take steps proportional to the negative of the gradient (or approximate gradient) of the function at the current point. But if we instead take steps proportional to the positive of the gradient, we approach a local maximum of that function; the procedure is then known as gradient ascent. Gradient descent is generally attributed to Cauchy, who first suggested it in 1847, but its convergence properties for non-linear optimization problems were first studied by Haskell Curry in 1944.
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I am a research-oriented machine learning systems engineer working on foundation model infrastructure, alignment, and evaluation. My work focuses on building efficient, reliable systems for large language models while studying the algorithms and data choices that make these models more useful, controllable, and cost-effective in real applications.
At TikTok, my recent work centers on Model-as-a-Service platforms and high-performance LLM inference. I develop serving infrastructure with vLLM and SGLang across model runtime integration, scheduling and continuous batching, KV-cache and memory management, distributed execution, observability, and reliability. This systems work is closely connected to my research on distributed disaggregated inference, preference optimization, instruction-tuning data selection, multimodal evaluation, and retrieval-augmented biomedical summarization.
My broader research spans reinforcement learning for robotics, healthcare sequence modeling, privacy-preserving machine learning, and motion planning. I am especially interested in model-system co-design: how model architecture, inference algorithms, data curation, hardware utilization, scheduling, and distributed runtimes interact. My goal is to advance frontier AI systems that are faster to experiment with, more rigorous to evaluate, and dependable enough to serve at scale.