Resume

General Information

Full Name Chenda Duan
Email dcdduan@gmail.com
Mobile 310-254-5864
Location Los Angeles, CA 90025

Technical Skills

AI & Machine Learning Representation learning, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Reinforcement Learning
Frameworks & Systems PyTorch, TensorFlow, CUDA, Docker, Linux
Programming Python, C++, R, Java, SQL.

Education

  • 2024.9 - Expected 2028.6
    Ph.D Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
    University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
    • Research: LLM/VLMs, AI for Science, Data Analysis, and general Machine Learning.
    • Teaching: Associate Teaching Instructor: Data Mining, Probability and Statistics, Complex Networks
  • 2022.9 - 2024.6
    Master of Science, Computer Science
    University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
    • GPA: 3.9
    • Teaching: Associate Instructor for CS M152A: Introductory Digital Design Laboratory. Leading the lab, instructing the basic knowledge of verilog and FPGA.
    • Teaching: Teaching Assistant for CS174A: Intro to Computer Graphics. Leading the discussion session with more than 50 students, lecturing advanced graphic knowledge and Javascript.
    • Teaching: Teaching Assistant for CS33: Introduction to Computer Organization. Leading the discussion session with more than 50 students, lecturing basically computer organization and architecture knowledge.
    • Core Courses: Cloud Computing, Data Mining, Adversarial Attack and Robustness, Advanced Computer Architecture, Hardware For Machine Learning.
  • 2019.9 - 2022.6
    Bacholar of Science, Computer Science
    University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
    • GPA: 4.0
    • Honor: Summa Cum Laude, Dean's Honors List
    • Teaching: Learning Assistant for CS32: Intro to Computer Science, lectured more than 50 students.
    • Core Courses: Algorithms, Computer Organization, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Network, Programming Languages, Database, Software Engineering, Computer Vision, NLP, Machine Learning

Work / Research Experience

  • 2026.3 - Present
    Research Intern
    Alibaba, Accio Team
    • Develop post-training methods for LLMs deployed in Accio Work.
  • 2024.6 - Present
    Ph.D. Student, Graduate Researcher
    UCLA Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury's Group
    • Developing an agentic video understanding framework for long-context video understanding and open-domain QA tasks.
    • Designed a RAG framework for multi-hop QA tasks. Two papers: AAAI 2026 Oral and ICML 2026 under review.
    • Developed a diagnosis pipeline that can process and analyze large-scale neuro-medical (iEEG) data. Built a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmarks. ICLR 2026.
    • Analyzed large-scale brain neuro data and developed models to decode human memories. Paper submitted to Nature and in revision after reviews.
  • 2023.6 - 2023.9
    Research Intern
    Kuaishou Technology, Kling Team
    • Developed vision-language models for video understanding.
  • 2022.3 - 2024.9
    Graduate Researcher
    UCLA Prof. Bolei Zhou's Group
    • Proposed a novel method and released a benchmark for embodied scene understanding in VLMs. Provided a large-scale dataset on spatial, temporal, and safety-critical scene understanding. CVPR 2025.
    • Built MetaUrban, a compositional evaluation platform for embodied AI in urban spaces, enabling autonomous driving research at scale. ICLR 2025 Spotlight.
    • Developed an improved Human-in-the-loop Reinforcement Learning method. The trained agent can master driving tasks in less than 30 minutes. NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight.
    • Built and tested a platform for large-scale traffic scenario modeling and simulation for RL, IL, and autonomous driving. NeurIPS 2023.

Projects

  • 2023.3 - 2023.6
    AR Glass Assistants APP (Java, AR)
    • Developed an AR Glasses Auxiliary Andriod App using Java, enabling image and sound capture and ensuring a s eamless user experience through efficient compression techniques.
    • Integrating Google AR core to enable object detection and sound classification.
    • Implemented a robust queuing system with congestion control to facilitate seamless data transfer between AR glasses and smartphones.
    • Minimized latency effects through a special design, enhancing the real-time responsiveness of the system.
    • Tested its resilience and reliability in real-world conditions for AR glasses.
  • 2023.3 - 2023.6
    Accelaration Library on Apple M Chip and NVIDIA GPU (MetalAPI, CUDA)
    • Developed a high-performance GEMM operation program that can achieve 6 TFLOPS performance. Using C++ and Metal API.
    • Developed an optimized Conv-2d program with CUDA, achieving comparable performance with cuBLAS
  • 2022.9 - 2022.12
    Gradient-based adversarial attacks against text transformers (Python, NLP)
    • Using BARTScore and BLEURT as similarity constraints to perform a gradient-based attack against commonly- used text transformers to explore their potential robustness problems, using Python
  • 2022.3 - 2022.6
    C++-based Web Server (C++, CI/CD, Rest API)
    • Built a NGINX standard web server with REST API capabilities using C++.
    • Constructed a CI/CD Pipeline on GCP with Detailed log info, test coverage monitoring using Google Test, and codereview using gerrit. Setup a monitor dashboard to record up-time and request latency.
    • Source Code
  • 2021.10 - 2021.12
    WebGL-based game (Javascript, WebGL, Computer Graphics)
    • Designed and implemented an online basketball-shooting game with advanced graphic features, including shadow, texture, and reflections, using JavaScript and WebGL.
    • Demo
  • 2020.10 - 2020.12
    Egglendar Online Calendar (React, SQL)
    • Developed an online student calendar specially for international students, with features of importing and converting calendars, adding school course schedules, and finding classmates.
    • Using Material-UI for designing and React for the front-end framework, and MySQL as the database.

Honors and Awards

  • 2019 - 2022
    • Dean's Honors List * 9
    • Summa Cum Laude

Other Interests

  • Sports: Basketball (I can dunk!), Badminton
  • Music: Double-keyboard Electone
  • Gaming: League of Legends, Valorant, BattleField, Overwatch, Terraria, Many more on steam and epic.