Chenchen Ye (PhD student at UCLA)

I am currently a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at UCLA, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Wei Wang. Prior to this, I obtained my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where I joined the NExT Research Center advised by Prof. Tat-Seng Chua.

I am broadly interested in ML and NLP, with a focus on developing LLM agents capable of solving complex tasks. My work emphasizes agentic reasoning, post-training, and evaluation in real-world problems, such as software engineering (SWE). I also explore heterogeneous knowledge integration, leveraging knowledge graphs, text, code, and visual representations to improve model capability, robustness, and interpretability. My research is supported by Amazon AI PhD Fellowship.

Preprints:

• Self-Verifying Software Engineering Agents through Discriminative Test Generation
  Chenchen Ye, Jeff Da, Brad Kenstler, Sean Hendryx
  Preprint 2026  [Paper]




• Training Recipes for Agentic Reinforcement Learning in LLMs: A Survey
  Ching Chang, Yijia Xiao, Jade Xu, Fred Xu, Chenchen Ye, Ruoyan Li, Junkai Zhang, Yihe Deng, Kyle Zheng, Ethan Ji, Alexander K Taylor, Weikai Li, Maryam Haghifam, Anthony Cuturrufo, Renliang Sun, Jiahang Sha, Yidan Shi, Wen-Chih Peng, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
  Preprint 2026  [Paper] [Homepage]




• CliBench: Multifaceted Evaluation of Large Language Models in Clinical Decisions on Diagnoses, Procedures, Lab Tests Orders and Prescriptions
  Mingyu Derek Ma, Chenchen Ye, Yu Yan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Peipei Ping, Timothy S Chang, Wei Wang
  Preprint 2024  [Paper] [Homepage]

Publications:

• MIRAI: Evaluating LLM Agents for Event Forecasting
  Chenchen Ye*, Ziniu Hu*, Yihe Deng*, Zijie Huang, Mingyu Derek Ma, Yanqiao Zhu, Wei Wang
  NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Scaling Environments for Agents (SEA)  [Paper] [Homepage] [Code]




• LLMs as Scalable, General-Purpose Simulators For Evolving Digital Agent Training
  Yiming Wang, Da Yin, Yuedong Cui, Ruichen Zheng, Zhiqian Li, Zongyu Lin, Di Wu, Xueqing Wu, Chenchen Ye, Yu Zhou, Kai-Wei Chang
  NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Scaling Environments for Agents (SEA), SoCal NLP Symposium 2024  [Paper] [Code]




• BioVerge: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Study of Self-Evaluating Agents for Hypothesis Generation
  Fuyi Yang*, Chenchen Ye*, Mingyu Derek Ma, Yijia Xiao, Matthew Yang, Wei Wang
  NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Bridging Language, Agent, and World Models for Reasoning and Planning (LAW)  [Paper]




• GraphVis: Boosting LLMs with Visual Knowledge Graph Integration
  Yihe Deng, Chenchen Ye, Zijie Huang, Mingyu Derek Ma, Yiwen Kou, Wei Wang
  NeurIPS 2024  [Paper]




• TCELongBench: Analyzing Temporal Complex Events with Large Language Models? A Benchmark towards Temporal, Long Context Understanding
  Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Chenchen Ye, Yunshan Ma, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua
  ACL 2024  [Paper] [Code & Data]




• Narrative Analysis of True Crime Podcasts With Knowledge Graph-Augmented Large Language Models
  James Chapman, Xinyi Leng, Jason Liang, Jack Mauro, Xu Wang, Andrea Bertozzi, Junyuan Lin, Bohan Chen, Chenchen Ye, Temple Daniel, P. Jeffrey Brantingham
  CIKM 2024 Workshop on Graph Techniques for Adversarial Activity Analytics (GTA³)  [Paper]




• SeCoGD: Context-aware Event Forecasting via Graph Disentanglement
  Yunshan Ma*, Chenchen Ye*, Zijian Wu, Xiang Wang, Yixin Cao, Tat-Seng Chua
  SIGKDD 2023  [Paper] [Code & Data] [Poster] [Slides]




• RERG: Reflecting on Experiences for Multimodal Response Generation
  Chenchen Ye, Lizi Liao, Suyu Liu, Tat-Seng Chua
  ACMMM 2022  [Paper] [Poster] [Slides]




• Co-Gen: Structured and Natural Responses Co-generation for Conversational Search
  Chenchen Ye, Lizi Liao, Fuli Feng, Wei Ji, Tat-Seng Chua
  SIGIR 2022 (Oral)  [Paper] [Code] [Slides]

• Research Intern, Frontier Reasoning and Agents, Jun 2025 - Sep 2025
  Scale AI, San Francisco, U.S.
  Mentor: Jeff Da, Sean Hendryx
  Topic: Software Engineering (SWE) Agents
  




• Research Intern, Jun 2024 - Sep 2024
  Mircrosoft Research, Redmond, U.S.
  Mentor: Ha Trinh, Darren Edge, Jonathan Larson
  Topic: Agentic GraphRAG
  




• Research Assistant, Aug 2022 - Aug 2023
  NExT++ Research Center, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
  Advisor: Tat-Seng Chua, Yunshan Ma
  Topic: Learning and Reasoning on Graphs for Knowledge-enhanced Information Retrieval
  




• Undergraduate Student Researcher, May 2021 - Jun 2022
  NExT++ Research Center, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
  Advisor: Tat-Seng Chua, Lizi Liao
  Topic: Textual and Multimodal Conversational Search and Response Generation

• PhD student in Computer Science
  University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), U.S.
  Sep 2023 - Present
  




• Bachelor of Compting (Computer Science) with Honours (Highest Distinction)
  National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
  Aug 2018 - Jun 2022
  

• Teaching Assistant @ UCLA
  - CS245 Big Data Analytics, Fall 2024
  - CS32 Introduction to Computer Science II, Winter 2024, Spring 2025
  

• Teaching Assistant @ NUS
  - CS2030 Programming Methodology II, Semester 1 AY2019/20
  - CS2040 Data Structure and Algorithm, Semester 1 AY2019/20
  

• Amazon AI PhD Fellow. Nov 2025

• ICLR 2025 Student Registration Grant.  Apr 2025

• Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize (Individual). NUS, Jun 2022

• Dean's List Awards.  NUS, AY2019-2020/ AY2021-2022

• Science & Technology Undergraduate Scholarship.  NUS, Aug 2018 - Jun 2022

• Senior Middle 2 Scholarship.  Singapore Ministry of Education, Aug 2018 - Jun 2022

Organizing Committee:

• FAST: Foundations of Agentic Systems Theory, AAAI 2026 Workshop. Singapore, Jan 2026

Invited Reviewer:

• ICML (2025–), NeurIPS (2024–), ICLR (2024–), COLM (2025–), ACL/ARR (2024–), KDD (2024–), CIKM (2024–), ACMMM (2023–)