Yikun Ban
Associate Professor
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Beihang University

I am a tenure-track associate professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at
Beihang University and a memeber of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment. Previously, I was a postdoc and obtained my Ph.D. degree at
Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worded closely with Prof.
Jingrui He, Prof.
Hanghang Tong, and Prof.
Arindam Banerjee.
Prior to this, I obtained my Master's degree from
EECS, Peking University and
bachelor's degree from
Wuhan University.

I am interested in principled algorithms in the space of multi-armed bandits/reinforcement learning and deep learning, to solve real-world exploitation-exploration problems. Current research topics:
- Neural Contextual Bandits - Foundations and Applications.
- Language Models with Exploration.
- Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback.

yikunb2[at]illinois.edu
Lab Webpage
Google Scholar

News
- 2024.12 "PageRank Bandit" is accepted by NeurIPS 2024, in which we first use bandit perspective to solve link prediction.
- 2024.12 "Robust Neural Contextual Bandit" is accepted by NeurIPS 2024, in which we remove the Positive Definite assumption for NTK Matrix.
- 2024.05 One paper is accepted by KDD 2024.
- 2023.12 I passed my PhD defense on 19 December 2023.
- 2022.09 One paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2022.
- 2022.01 One paper was accepted by ICLR 2022 Spotlight. EE-Net provides a novel neural-based exploration strategy, distinct from
standard UCB and TS.