Chen-Yu Lee

Chen-Yu Lee

Principal Scientist & Director, Google Cloud AI Research

I lead teams across research, product, and engineering building agents that work over long horizons: how they research, remember, and improve themselves. We carry that research into products used by millions.

From research to production
Agents that Research
Developed Test-Time Diffusion Deep Researcher, which refines drafts like diffusion denoising. Powering Gemini Deep Research (Enterprise & Max), featured on Alphabet’s Q1 2026 earnings call.
Agents that Remember
Launched MemoryBank, long-term memory that lets agents recall and reflect on past interactions, in Gemini Enterprise and BigQuery, highlighted at Google Cloud NEXT 2026.
Agents that Collaborate
Integrated Heterogeneous Swarms, which learns how multiple LLMs divide roles, into Gemini Enterprise Agent Designer, announced by the Google Cloud CEO.

Research Agenda

Today's agents are strong at short tasks but weak at getting better over time. Our teams now focus on what it takes to close that gap:
  • Environments are the bottleneck. Agents can only learn from the worlds we give them, and most of those worlds are static. EnvHarness turns static data and tools into interactive environments that agents can learn in.
  • Experience should transfer. Agents should distill reusable insights from their successes and failures, and curate the skills worth carrying from one task to the next. That's the idea behind ReasoningBank and SkillOS.
  • Self-improvement has to stay bounded. Once agents improve their own harnesses, the hard problem is keeping that improvement stable, measurable, and under human oversight. RRSI regularizes the loop so the agent gets better without drifting.
I've worked on deep learning since my PhD at UC San Diego, advised by Zhuowen Tu with mentorship from Simon Osindero, where my work on Deeply-Supervised Nets later received the AISTATS 2025 Test-of-Time Award. I then joined the AI Research Group at Magic Leap with Andrew Rabinovich, and later Apple, where I launched foundational features for ARKit (now powering Vision Pro) and published the group's first-ever research paper, at CVPR (featured by Apple ML Journal).

Selected Talks

Guest lecture at UC Berkeley, From Goldfish to Self-Improving Agents, 2026
From Goldfish to Self-Improving Agents, a Fall 2026 guest lecture at UC Berkeley on continual learning and safe self-improvement.
Agent Fundamentals talk at NeurIPS 2025 Expo
Agent Fundamentals, Expo Talk at NeurIPS 2025, on deep research, memory, and multi-agent systems in Gemini Enterprise.
Test-of-Time Award talk at AISTATS 2025
Test-of-Time Award at AISTATS 2025 for Deeply-Supervised Nets (announcement · UCSD News).
Keynote at The Google School for Leaders, 2026
Keynote at The Google School for Leaders 2026, on turning research into product impact.
Upcoming ICLR 2027 April 29–30
Invited talks at three workshops on long-horizon agents, self-improving agents, and agent evaluation.

Selected Papers

Honors & Awards

Test-of-Time Award at AISTATS 2025
Google Spotlight Award at ACL 2023
Oral: NAACL 2025, ACL 2021, NIPS 2014 DL Workshop

Academic Service

Area Chair: NeurIPS (2025, 2026), ICLR (2024, 2025, 2026, 2027), ICML (2026)
Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLM, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, BMVC, PAMI, IJCV, JMLR
Outstanding Reviewer: CVPR 2019, BMVC 2019