Hantao Yu (余晗涛)
PhD candidate @ Columbia CS
Email: hantao dot yu at columbia dot edu
[Google Scholar] [CV]
Hantao Yu (余晗涛)
PhD candidate @ Columbia CS
Email: hantao dot yu at columbia dot edu
[Google Scholar] [CV]
I am on 2026-2027 industry job market, looking to start around March 2027!
Hello, welcome to my homepage! I am a 5th year (Fall 2022 - present) Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, where I am affiliated with Columbia Core AI Lab. My advisors are Josh Alman and Alexandr Andoni. I graduated from UC San Diego in June 2022 with a B.S. in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science. During undergrad I worked with Chris Umans and Max Hopkins.
Research interests
Most recently I have been working on post-training for LLMs (RL, OPD, SFT) and various downstream applications including autoformalization, reasoning and agents.
I have worked on algorithm design, fine-grained complexity theory, LLM expressivity.
Pipeline Math Project: Before GPT 5.6 came out, we built an agentic pipeline that solves Erdős problem 477/1038, a few COLT open problems and a few commutative algebra open problems from Cahen–Fontana–Frisch–Glaz! Check out Pipeline Math for details!
Industry Experiences
I was an applied scientist intern at amazon in summer 2026, where I worked with Udaya Ghai and Sandy Han on On-Policy Context Distillation in NeuroSymbolic AI and autoformalization.
I was a student researcher at Google (Feb 2025 - Aug 2025), hosted by Clayton Sanford and Jean Pouget-Abadie, where I worked on cross-tokenizer distillation.