Max Qiushi Lin

I am a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University , advised by Sharan Vaswani. I work on theory and algorithms for machine learning.

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Research

I am broadly interested in machine learning and sequential decision making, focusing on building theoretical foundations and designing practical algorithms for reinforcement learning.

Papers

Optimistic Actor-Critic with Parametric Policies: Unifying Sample Efficiency and Practicality
Max Qiushi Lin, Reza Asad, Kevin Tan, Haque Ishfaq, Csaba Szepesvári, Sharan Vaswani.
NeurIPS Workshop on Aligning Reinforcement Learning Experimentalists and Theorists (ARLET), 2025.

Rethinking the Global Convergence of Softmax Policy Gradient with Linear Function Approximation
Max Qiushi Lin, Jincheng Mei, Matin Aghaei, Michael Lu, Bo Dai, Alekh Agarwal, Dale Schuurmans, Csaba Szepesvári, Sharan Vaswani.
Preprint, 2025.