Yilan Chen

Ph.D. candidate · UC San Diego

I am a final-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), working with Prof. Arya Mazumdar. During my Ph.D., I have interned at AWS Agentic AI, Google Research, and RIKEN AIP.

Yilan Chen

Research

My research aims to build AI systems that learn efficiently and generalize reliably. I pursue this goal by developing better learning algorithms, establishing their theoretical foundations, and studying how models acquire and transfer knowledge. My current focus is LLM post-training for reasoning models and agents.

Teacher supervision and reward feedback guide student learning.

LLM Post-training & Agent Learning

I develop reinforcement learning and on-policy distillation methods that help reasoning models and agents learn more effectively from teacher supervision and task feedback. My work aligns token-level learning signals with task rewards, connects distillation to RL advantage estimation, and uses privileged training information to improve agent learning.

Publications

LLM Post-training & Agent Learning

Learning Theory & Generalization

Interpretability & Knowledge Transfer

Experience

AWS Agentic AI

Jun. – Sep. 2026

Applied Scientist Intern · Santa Clara, USA

Host: Vijay Lingam

LLM Post-training: Reinforcement Learning and Distillation

RIKEN AIP

Jun. – Sep. 2024

Research Intern · Tokyo, Japan

Advisor: Prof. Taiji Suzuki

Theory of Neural Networks and Language Models

Education

University of California San Diego

Sep. 2022 – Mar. 2027 (expected)

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Advisor: Arya Mazumdar

University of California San Diego

Sep. 2020 – Jun. 2022

M.S. in Computer Science

Xi’an Jiaotong University

Aug. 2015 – Jun. 2019

B.E. in Information Engineering

Talks

Analyzing Generalization of Neural Networks through Loss Path Kernels

Slides
  • ByteDance
  • AI TIME

Teaching

Professional Service