Chenda Duan

🔍 Actively Seeking Opportunities:

• 2026 Summer Internship / 2026 Winter and Spring Part-time Internship as a Research Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, or Quant Researcher in the US.

If you believe there’s a potential fit, please feel free to email me. I’m eager to explore new challenges and collaborations.

About me

Hello there! I’m Chenda Duan, a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at UCLA, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury. I earned both my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA as well, conducting my master’s research under the guidance of Prof. Bolei Zhou. During my bachelor’s studies, I had the opportunity to work with Prof. M. Khalid Jawed and Dr. Roel Ophoff. I am a 10-year UCLA Bruin!

My current research lies on inference-time augmentations for LLM/VLMs. I am buidling next-gen RAG system together with agentic designing to facilliate better long-context understanding for the LLMs/VLMs. And I am also exploring inference-time attention grounding method for focused reasoning capabilities.

I am also working at the intersection of AI and Medical Neuroscience. I am particularly focused on applying machine learning techniques on brain signals to decode human memories and to detect and cure diseaes.

My previous research experience includes work in autonomous driving, reinforcement learning, and robotic.

News

Feb 26, 2025	One paper got accepted to ICLR 2025 as Spotlight, and one paper got accepted to CVPR 2025!🎉 Thanks to my co-authors!😄
Mar 22, 2024	Finally got my Ph.D offer from UCLA ECE! Another 5 years@UCLA🤔
Sep 22, 2023	Two papers accepted by NeurIPS 2023!🎉 One as Spotlight and one as Poster!🙂
Sep 13, 2023	I will be the Associate Instructor for CSM152A for the fall quarter！
Apr 10, 2023	I will join Kuaishou Technology® as a ML & Algorithm Engineer Intern this Summer!🙂
Mar 12, 2023	I will be the TA for CS33 next quarter!
Nov 8, 2022	I will continue to be the TA for CS174A for Winter 2023 (and potentially Spring2023)!
Sep 9, 2022	I will be the TA for UCLA-CS174A this FALL🧐
Apr 1, 2022	I finally decide to stay at UCLA for two more years for the MSCS program😊
Mar 19, 2022	Master degree application seasons ends, just like 3 years ago, nothing exciting, only pities😷
Jul 25, 2020	I swithed my major to Computer Science, before it starting declining🥶
Mar 22, 2019	I got admitted to UCLA with physics as my major🥳
Jun 30, 2016	I decided to go to international department of my high school, and give up taking 高考👀
Nov 8, 2000	I was born!

About my academics.

The field of computer science is vast and ever-evolving. Within this expansive domain, it is hard to constrain yourself into a specific area of interest. I am a firm believer in the power of interdisciplinary research and the importance of a broad skillset. I am passionate about the intersection of machine learning, medical science/neurosicence, computer vision, LLMs, and robotics.

Research Interests:

• LLM, VLM
• AI for Science
• Reinforcement Learning
• Robotics

At UCLA, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with three prominent research teams:

Research Groups:

• UCLA Prof Vwani Roychowdhury’s Group
• UCLA Prof Bolei Zhou’S Group
• UCLA’s Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics.
• UCLA Structures-Computer Interaction Lab.

For more information about me, connections, or just a friendly chat, all contact and social media details are available below.