Yanfei Chen

Google

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

I'm a core contributor of Google Anti Money Laundering AI, Vertex AI Search, Gemini Enterprise Deep Research, and Vertex AI Agent Engine Memory Bank.

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.

Please email me if you are interested in working with me or joining our team.

Experience

2020 — Now Google — Software Engineer / Research Engineer
2018 — 2020 Qeexo (now TDK SensEI) — Machine Learning Research Engineer

Education

PhD University of Pittsburgh — Industrial Engineering
BS Peking University — Electrical Engineering & Economics

Publications

2026
SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents Siru Ouyang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Rui Meng, Chun-Liang Li, Yizhu Jiao, Kaiwen Zha, Maohao Shen, Vishy Tirumalashetty, George Lee, Jiawei Han, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
arXiv 2026 pdf abstract
RubricEM: Meta-RL with Rubric-guided Policy Decomposition beyond Verifiable Rewards Gaotang Li, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Zifeng Wang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Chun-Liang Li, Long T. Le, Rujun Han, George Lee, Hanghang Tong, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
arXiv 2026 pdf abstract
ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memory Siru Ouyang, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Yanfei Chen, Ke Jiang, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han, Long T. Le, Samira Daruki, Xiangru Tang, Vishy Tirumalashetty, George Lee, Mahsan Rofouei, Hangfei Lin, Jiawei Han, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
ICLR 2026 pdf abstract
Supervised Reinforcement Learning: From Expert Trajectories to Step-wise Reasoning Yihe Deng, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han, Gufeng Zhang, Yanfei Chen, Wei Wang, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
ICLR 2026 pdf abstract
SAGE: Steerable Agentic Data Generation for Deep Search with Execution Feedback Fangyuan Xu, Rujun Han, Yanfei Chen, Zifeng Wang, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Vishy Tirumalashetty, Eunsol Choi, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
EACL 2026 pdf abstract
2025
Budget-Aware Tool-Use Enables Effective Agent Scaling Tengxiao Liu, Zifeng Wang, Jin Miao, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Jiefeng Chen, Rujun Han, Fangyuan Xu, Yanfei Chen, Ke Jiang, Samira Daruki, Yi Liang, William Yang Wang, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
arXiv 2025 pdf abstract
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)
arXiv 2025 pdf abstract
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 pdf abstract
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 pdf abstract
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 pdf abstract
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 pdf abstract
2024
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 pdf abstract
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 pdf abstract
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 pdf abstract
Search-Adaptor: Embedding Customization for Information Retrieval Jinsung Yoon, Yanfei Chen, Sercan Arik, Tomas Pfister
ACL 2024 pdf abstract

See my Google Scholar for the full and most up-to-date list of publications.

Academic Service

Reviewer ARR, NeurIPS (Outstanding Reviewer, 2025)

Beyond Research

Reading, photography, and traveling. Watching NFL games — let's go Steelers!