David Haolong Lee 李昊龙

dhlee [at] usc [dot] edu

GitHub Google Scholar LinkedIn Resume CV

Seeking full-time Software Enginner or Researcher position starting Summer 2025!

I am a master's student in computer science @ USC, where I also obtained my bachelor's degree in computer science with honors. I am a member of the ICAROS lab @ USC and the USC Theory Group. I am fortunate to be advised by the wonderful Stefanos Nikolaidis and to have worked closely with David Kempe and Shaddin Dughmi. I am also extremely thankful for my mentors and close collaborators Bryon Tjanaka and Matthew Fontaine.

My research interests are continuous optimization, interpretability in machine learning, robust and adaptive agents, and quality diversity optimization. I am excited about deriving practically useful algorithms from theoretical computer science.

Publications

dpvis: A Visual and Interactive Learning Tool for Dynamic Programming
David H. Lee, Aditya Prasad, Ramiro Deo-Campo Vuong, Tianyu Wang, Eric Han, David Kempe
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS), February 2025
arXiv Slides
Density Descent Search for Diversity Optimization
David H. Lee, Anishalakshmi V. Palaparthi, Matthew C. Fontaine, Bryon Tjanaka, Stefanos Nikolaidis
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), July 2024
arXiv Slides
Training Diverse High-Dimensional Controllers by Scaling Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Annealing
Bryon Tjanaka, Matthew C. Fontaine, David H. Lee, Aniruddha Kalkar, Stefanos Nikolaidis
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 8, no. 10, pp. 6771-6778, October 2023
arXiv GitHub Website
pyribs: A Bare-Bones Python Library for Quality Diversity Optimization
Bryon Tjanaka, Matthew C. Fontaine, David H. Lee, Yulun Zhang, Nivedit Reddy Balam, Nathaniel Dennler, Sujay S. Garlanka, Nikitas Dimitri Klapsis, Stefanos Nikolaidis
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), July 2023
arXiv GitHub Website

Manuscripts

Upgrading CMA-ME to CMA-MAE on the Sphere Benchmark
David H. Lee, Bryon Tjanaka, Nivedit Reddy Balam, Matthew C. Fontaine, Stefanos Nikolaidis
Website
Quality Diversity Optimization: A Modular Framework and Continuous Density Estimation
Bachelor's Thesis
PDF Slides
An Overview of Low-Rank Matrix Completion using Convex Optimization Techniques
Ramiro Deo-Campo Vuong, David H. Lee, Aditya Prasad, Yibo Wen
PDF GitHub

Teaching

Introduction to Algorithms and the Theory of Computing
CSCI 270 @ USC, Teaching Assistant
Spring 2024
Discrete Methods in Computer Science
CSCI 170 @ USC, Teaching Assistant
Spring 2023, Summer 2023, Fall 2024

Presentations

Other

I spend most of my free time playing volleyball (indoor and beach). I also enjoy cooking (my go-to choices are mostly chinese cuisine).