Yanfei Chen

I am a Research Engineer at Google Cloud AI Research. My work focuses on using LLMs to solve practical problems, specifically in areas such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), tool learning, and LLM agents.

I earned my PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, where I was advised by Professor Young Jae Chun. My doctoral research focused on structural modeling and analysis of implantable medical devices.

I graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Peking University.

2020 - Present, Software Engineer / Research Engineer, Google
2018 - 2020, Machine Learning Research Engineer, Qeexo (now TDK SensEI)

PhD, Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh
BS, Economics, Peking University
BS, Electrical Engineering, Peking University

Deep Researcher with Test-Time Diffusion
Rujun Han*, Yanfei Chen*, Zoey CuiZhu, Lesly Miculicich, Guan Sun, Yuanjun Bi, Weiming Wen, Hui Wan, Chunfeng Wen, Solène Maître, George Lee, Vishy Tirumalashetty, Emily Xue, Zizhao Zhang, Salem Haykal, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee (* = Equal Contribution)
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PlanGEN: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Planning and Reasoning Trajectories for Complex Problem Solving
Mihir Parmar, Xin Liu, Palash Goyal, Yanfei Chen, Long Le, Swaroop Mishra, Hossein Mobahi, Jindong Gu, Zifeng Wang, Hootan Nakhost, Chitta Baral, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister, Hamid Palangi
EMNLP 2025 | Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
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Towards Compute-Optimal Many-Shot In-Context Learning
Shahriar Golchin, Yanfei Chen, Rujun Han, Manan Gandhi, Tianli Yu, Swaroop Mishra, Mihai Surdeanu, Rishabh Agarwal, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
COLM 2025 | Conference on Language Modeling
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In prospect and retrospect: Reflective memory management for long-term personalized dialogue agents
Zhen Tan, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Long T Le, Yiwen Song, Yanfei Chen, Hamid Palangi, George Lee, Anand Iyer, Tianlong Chen, Huan Liu, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
ACL 2025 | Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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Magnet: Multi-turn tool-use data synthesis and distillation via graph translation
Fan Yin, Zifeng Wang, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Ke Jiang, Yanfei Chen, Jindong Gu, Long T Le, Kai-Wei Chang, Chen-Yu Lee, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
ACL 2025 | Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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Tablerag: Million-token table understanding with language models
Si-An Chen, Lesly Miculicich, Julian Eisenschlos, Zifeng Wang, Zilong Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yasuhisa Fujii, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
NeurIPS 2024 | Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
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Chain of agents: Large language models collaborating on long-context tasks
Yusen Zhang, Ruoxi Sun, Yanfei Chen, Tomas Pfister, Rui Zhang, Sercan Arik
NeurIPS 2024 | Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
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Re-invoke: Tool invocation rewriting for zero-shot tool retrieval
Yanfei Chen, Jinsung Yoon, Devendra Singh Sachan, Qingze Wang, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Mohammadhossein Bateni, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
EMNLP 2024 | Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
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Search-Adaptor: Embedding Customization for Information Retrieval
Jinsung Yoon, Yanfei Chen, Sercan Arik, Tomas Pfister
ACL 2024 | Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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Check out my Google Scholar for a list of my previous publications.