Chen-Yu Lee

Chen-Yu Lee

Principal Scientist & Director, Google Cloud AI Research

Publications

A selection of my papers, filterable by topic. For the complete list, see Google Scholar.

VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks

Caiqi Zhang, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Zoey CuiZhu, Nigel Collier, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee arXiv 2026 · Paper · Project Page · Code · Dataset

RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses

Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying CuiZhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee arXiv 2026 · Paper · Project Page · Code

EnvHarness: Awakening Static Worlds for Agent Learning

Chengsong Huang, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Zoey CuiZhu, Ke Jiang, Peng Xia, Han Yu, Yufan Zhuang, Yifei Ming, Jiaqi Pan, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Jiaxin Huang, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee arXiv 2026 · Paper · Project Page · Code

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 NeurIPS 2026 · Paper

FinanceHarness: Autonomous Financial Deep Research Framework

Yijia Xiao, Rujun Han, Yanfei Chen, Zifeng Wang, Ke Jiang, Zhongying CuiZhu, Vishy Tirumalashetty, Wei Wang, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee EMNLP 2026 · Paper (Findings) · FinanceGym Leaderboard

Gemma 4 Technical Report

Gemini Team, Google (contributor) arXiv 2026 · Paper

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 COLM 2026 · Paper · Code — Featured in VentureBeat

When One LLM Drools, Multi-LLM Collaboration Rules

Shangbin Feng, Wenxuan Ding, Alisa Liu, Zifeng Wang, Weijia Shi, Yike Wang, Zejiang Shen, Xiaochuang Han, Hunter Lang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov ACL 2026 · Paper

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 · Paper · Code · Google AI Blog — Featured in VentureBeat and Andrej Karpathy's interview

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 · Paper — Featured in VentureBeat

Universal Model Routing for Efficient LLM Inference

Wittawat Jitkrittum, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Ankit Singh Rawat, Jeevesh Juneja, Zifeng Wang, Chen-Yu Lee, Pradeep Shenoy, Rina Panigrahy, Aditya Krishna Menon, Sanjiv Kumar ICLR 2026 · Paper

ATLAS: Adaptive Transfer Scaling Laws for Multilingual Pretraining, Finetuning, and Decoding the Curse of Multilinguality

Shayne Longpre, Sneha Kudugunta, Niklas Muennighoff, I-Hung Hsu, Isaac Caswell, Alex Pentland, Sercan Arik, Chen-Yu Lee, Sayna Ebrahimi ICLR 2026 · Paper

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 arXiv 2025 · Paper · Google AI Blog — Featured in VentureBeat

Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities

Gemini Team, Google (contributor) arXiv 2025 · Paper

Heterogeneous Swarms: Jointly Optimizing Model Roles and Weights for Multi-LLM Systems

Shangbin Feng, Zifeng Wang, Palash Goyal, Yike Wang, Weijia Shi, Huang Xia, Hamid Palangi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Yulia Tsvetkov, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister NeurIPS 2025 · Paper

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 · Paper

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 · Paper

Model Swarms: Collaborative Search to Adapt LLM Experts via Swarm Intelligence

Shangbin Feng, Zifeng Wang, Yike Wang, Sayna Ebrahimi, Hamid Palangi, Lesly Miculicich, Achin Kulshrestha, Nathalie Rauschmayr, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister ICML 2025 · Paper

Speculative Knowledge Distillation: Bridging the Teacher-Student Gap Through Interleaved Sampling

Wenda Xu, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Long T. Le, Dhruv Madeka, Lei Li, William Yang Wang, Rishabh Agarwal, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister ICLR 2025 · Paper · Code

Speculative RAG: Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation through Drafting

Zilong Wang, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Swaroop Mishra, Vincent Perot, Yuwei Zhang, Anush Mattapalli, Ankur Taly, Jingbo Shang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister ICLR 2025 · Paper · Google AI Blog

Reverse Thinking Makes LLMs Stronger Reasoners

Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Zifeng Wang, Hamid Palangi, Rujun Han, Sayna Ebrahimi, Long Le, Vincent Perot, Swaroop Mishra, Mohit Bansal, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister NAACL 2025 · Paper · Code

Where is the answer? An empirical study of positional bias for parametric knowledge extraction in language model

Kuniaki Saito, Chen-Yu Lee, Kihyuk Sohn, Yoshitaka Ushiku NAACL 2025 · Paper — Oral Presentation

TableRAG: Million-Token Tabular Reasoning with Large Language Models

Si-An Chen, Lesly Miculicich, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Zifeng Wang, Zilong Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yasuhisa Fujii, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister NeurIPS 2024 · Paper · Code

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 · Paper (Findings) · Google AI Blog

CaLM: Contrasting Large and Small Language Models to Verify Grounded Generation

I-Hung Hsu, Zifeng Wang, Long T. Le, Lesly Miculicich, Nanyun Peng, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister ACL 2024 · Paper (Findings)

Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization

Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Yung-Sung Chuang, Chun-Liang Li, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Abhishek Kumar, James R. Glass, Alexander Ratner, Chen-Yu Lee, Ranjay Krishna, Tomas Pfister ACL 2024 · Paper (Findings) — Featured in Alpha Matica

LMDX: Language Model-based Document Information Extraction and Localization

Vincent Perot, Kai Kang, Florian Luisier, Guolong Su, Xiaoyu Sun, Ramya Sree Boppana, Zilong Wang, Zifeng Wang, Jiaqi Mu, Hao Zhang, Chen-Yu Lee, Nan Hua ACL 2024 · Paper (Findings)

CodecLM: Aligning Language Models with Tailored Synthetic Data

Zifeng Wang, Chun-Liang Li, Vincent Perot, Long T. Le, Jin Miao, Zizhao Zhang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister NAACL 2024 · Paper (Findings) · Google AI Blog

Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding

Zilong Wang, Hao Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Vincent Perot, Zifeng Wang, Lesly Miculicich, Yasuhisa Fujii, Jingbo Shang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister ICLR 2024 · Paper · Code · Google AI Blog

Tool Documentation Enables Zero-Shot Tool-Usage with Large Language Models

Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Si-An Chen, Chun-Liang Li, Yasuhisa Fujii, Alexander Ratner, Chen-Yu Lee, Ranjay Krishna, Tomas Pfister arXiv 2023 · Paper

Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes

Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Chun-Liang Li, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Hootan Nakhost, Yasuhisa Fujii, Alexander Ratner, Ranjay Krishna, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister ACL 2023 · Paper (Findings) · Code · Google AI Blog — Google ACL 2023 Spotlight

QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework

Zifeng Wang, Zizhao Zhang, Jacob Devlin, Chen-Yu Lee, Guolong Su, Hao Zhang, Jennifer Dy, Vincent Perot, Tomas Pfister ACL 2023 · Paper (Findings)

FormNetV2: Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction

Chen-Yu Lee, Chun-Liang Li, Hao Zhang, Timothy Dozat, Vincent Perot, Guolong Su, Xiang Zhang, Kihyuk Sohn, Nikolai Glushnev, Renshen Wang, Joshua Ainslie, Shangbang Long, Siyang Qin, Yasuhisa Fujii, Nan Hua, Tomas Pfister ACL 2023 · Paper

VRDU: A Benchmark for Visually-rich Document Understanding

Zilong Wang, Yichao Zhou, Wei Wei, Chen-Yu Lee, Sandeep Tata KDD 2023 · Paper · Code · Dataset

Multimodal Prompting with Missing Modalities for Visual Recognition

Yi-Lun Lee, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Wei-Chen Chiu, Chen-Yu Lee CVPR 2023 · Paper · Code

Pic2Word: Mapping Pictures to Words for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval

Kuniaki Saito, Kihyuk Sohn, Xiang Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Chen-Yu Lee, Kate Saenko, Tomas Pfister CVPR 2023 · Paper · Code · Google AI Blog

Prefix Conditioning Unifies Language and Label Supervision

Kuniaki Saito, Kihyuk Sohn, Xiang Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Chen-Yu Lee, Kate Saenko, Tomas Pfister CVPR 2023 · Paper · Google AI Blog

DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning

Zifeng Wang, Zizhao Zhang, Sayna Ebrahimi, Ruoxi Sun, Han Zhang, Chen-Yu Lee, Xiaoqi Ren, Guolong Su, Vincent Perot, Jennifer Dy, Tomas Pfister ECCV 2022 · Paper · Code

FormNet: Structural Encoding beyond Sequential Modeling in Form Document Information Extraction

Chen-Yu Lee, Chun-Liang Li, Timothy Dozat, Vincent Perot, Guolong Su, Nan Hua, Joshua Ainslie, Renshen Wang, Yasuhisa Fujii, Tomas Pfister ACL 2022 · Paper · Google AI Blog

Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning

Zifeng Wang, Zizhao Zhang, Chen-Yu Lee, Han Zhang, Ruoxi Sun, Xiaoqi Ren, Guolong Su, Vincent Perot, Jennifer Dy, Tomas Pfister CVPR 2022 · Paper · Code · Google AI Blog

ROPE: Reading Order Equivariant Positional Encoding for Graph-based Document Information Extraction

Chen-Yu Lee, Chun-Liang Li, Chu Wang, Renshen Wang, Yasuhisa Fujii, Siyang Qin, Ashok Popat, Tomas Pfister ACL 2021 · Paper — Oral Presentation

Learning to Branch for Multi-Task Learning

Pengsheng Guo, Chen-Yu Lee, Daniel Ulbricht ICML 2020 · Paper

Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Chen-Yu Lee, Tanmay Batra, Mohammad Haris Baig, Daniel Ulbricht CVPR 2019 · Paper · Code ·  ML Journal

GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks

Zhao Chen, Vijay Badrinarayanan, Chen-Yu Lee, Andrew Rabinovich ICML 2018 · Paper

RoomNet: End-to-End Room Layout Estimation

Chen-Yu Lee, Vijay Badrinarayanan, Tomasz Malisiewicz, Andrew Rabinovich ICCV 2017 · Paper

Recursive Recurrent Nets with Attention Modeling for OCR in the Wild

Chen-Yu Lee, Simon Osindero CVPR 2016 · Paper

Generalizing Pooling Functions in Convolutional Neural Networks: Mixed, Gated, and Tree

Chen-Yu Lee, Patrick Gallagher, Zhuowen Tu TPAMI 2017 · Paper
AISTATS 2016 · Paper · Code

Deeply-Supervised Nets

Chen-Yu Lee*, Saining Xie*, Patrick Gallagher, Zhengyou Zhang, Zhuowen Tu (*equal contribution) AISTATS 2015 · Paper · Code — Test-of-Time Award, AISTATS 2025 (slides)
NIPS 2014 DL Workshop · Paper — Oral Presentation

Region-based Discriminative Feature Pooling for Scene Text Recognition

Chen-Yu Lee, Anurag Bhardwaj, Wei Di, Vignesh Jagadeesh, Robinson Piramuthu CVPR 2014 · Paper