Hi, I'm Tesi Xiao.

Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Search, building machine learning systems that serve hundreds of millions of customers — from ideation to production.

I received my Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Davis, advised by Prof. Krishna Balasubramanian, and my B.S. in Statistics from Zhejiang University. My work bridges optimization theory and large-scale machine learning systems, with a focus on principled methods that actually ship.

News

[2026/04] Our paper on test-time optimal control for LLM reasoning is accepted to ICML 2026.
[2025/12] Thrilled to be promoted to Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Core Search, now based in Seattle!
[2025/05] Our paper on conditioned one-shot multi-objective DPO is accepted to UAI 2025.
[2025/01] Our first HCI paper on designing and evaluating multi-objective rankers is accepted to IUI 2025.
[2024/05] Our work on optimal stochastic bilevel optimization under relaxed smoothness is published in JMLR.
[2024/01] Two papers accepted — one at ICLR 2024 and one at AISTATS 2024.
[2023/07] Defended my Ph.D. at UC Davis and joined Amazon Search Science and AI as an Applied Scientist in Palo Alto.