Chenda Duan
ECE PhD @ UCLA | Research Intern @ Alibaba Accio | MS. CS 24' | BS. CS 22'
Los Angeles, CA
Email: chenda@ucla.edu
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 am currently also an intern at Alibaba Accio, where I do Agentic Post-Training.
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 in inference-time augmentation for LLMs/VLMs and post-training for LLMs. I am building next-generation RAG and structured memory systems with agentic design to enable better long-context understanding, multimodal reasoning, and agentic video understanding. More recently, I have been working on memory structures for agents, with the goal of helping LLMs/VLMs organize, retrieve, and reason over long-horizon context more effectively.
At Alibaba Accio, I am a core owner of the training effort for Accio’s next-generation agentic model, focusing on agentic post-training, RL pipelines, interactive agent-environment infrastructure, and scalable training systems.
A second line of my research focuses on AI for Neuroscience, where I develop machine learning systems for decoding human memory and cognition from neural activity. More broadly, I aim to bridge neuroscience and artificial intelligence in both directions: using AI to uncover the neural basis of memory and cognition, and drawing inspiration from the brain to design more adaptive architectures and learning algorithms.
My previous research experience spans autonomous driving, reinforcement learning, robotics, and biomedical AI.
News
| May 1, 2026 | One paper got in ICML 2026! 😄 Thanks to all the co-authors~ |
|---|---|
| Feb 11, 2026 | I will join Accio @ Alibaba in Sunnyvale as Research Intern starting March! |
| Jan 26, 2026 | Omni-iEEG got accepted to ICLR 2026😄 |
| Nov 7, 2025 | One paper got accepted to AAAI 2026 as Oral Presentation!🎉 |
| 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
- Autonomous Systems and Robotics
- Reinforcement Learning
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.