I am Yinda Chen (陈胤达), a Ph.D. candidate jointly trained by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and the Shanghai AI Lab, majoring in Information and Communication Engineering. I expect to graduate in June 2027.

More about my background and experience

I welcome research discussions and collaboration on representation learning, embodied intelligence, agentic models, and connectomics. Please feel free to reach out.


🎯 Research Areas


🔥 News


📖 Education

🎓 Academic Background 3
USTC logo

University of Science and Technology of China & Shanghai AI Lab

Ph.D. candidate, Information and Communication Engineering

📍 Hefei & Shanghai · July 2024 - June 2027 (expected)

USTC logo

University of Science and Technology of China

M.S. in Computer Technology

📍 Hefei · Sept 2022 - July 2024

Xiamen University logo

Xiamen University

Dual bachelor's degrees in Environmental Ecological Engineering and Economics

📍 Xiamen · Sept 2018 - July 2022


💼 Professional Experience

🏢 Industry Experience 4
X-Humanoid logo

Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (X-Humanoid)

Core Member, Embodied Intelligence World Model Team

📍 Beijing · Dec 2025 - Present

  • Developing unified embodied models that connect scene and instruction understanding, future prediction, and robot action.
  • Core contributor to Pelican-Unified 1.0, focusing on unified vision-language modeling and action capability.
  • Contributed to Pelican-VLA 0.5, studying bottleneck representations for task-relevant perception and manipulation across scenes and embodiments.
Ubiquant logo

Ubiquant (九坤投资)

Research Intern, Quantitative Research and Foundation Models

📍 Beijing · May 2026 - Oct 2026

  • Worked on quantitative research and language models for factor mining and data-driven decisions, with experience in thousand-GPU-scale training.
  • Contributor and co-author of IQuest-Q1, an agentic foundation model for CLI interaction, coding, and multi-step tool use (October 2026 technical report).
  • Core contributor to SAIL, a scientific-agent model for literature research, scientific coding, and multi-step research workflows (October 2026).
Tencent logo

Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG)

Qingyun Program Intern

📍 Shanghai · Aug 2025 - Dec 2025

  • Developed multimodal scene understanding and game world models for gameplay analysis and content generation.
  • Worked on Honor of Kings – Lingbao, including text-to-speech and live match commentary, with Dr. Liang Du and Dr. Wentao Yao.
  • Contributed to MAIN-VLA, a world model for Game for Peace (和平精英) that connects intentions, game states, and actions.
  • Researched router-free MoE-LoRA adaptation through linear aggregation and merging of low-rank expert updates.
PLA General Hospital logo

PLA General Hospital (301 Hospital)

Research Intern, Data Compression Group

📍 Beijing · Sept 2023 - Feb 2024

  • Collaborated with Prof. Qionghai Dai's team on medical image compression, designing methods adapted to different imaging modalities.
🎓 Academic Experience 3
Imperial College London logo

Imperial College London

Research Intern, Data Science Institute

📍 London (remote) · Nov 2022 - Aug 2023

Xiamen University logo

Xiamen University WISER Club

Academic Community Member, Data Mining Group

📍 Xiamen · Aug 2021 - July 2022

  • Designed and delivered data mining courses on clustering and Transformers, and mentored undergraduate machine learning projects. Campus feature.
Xiamen University logo

Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics, Xiamen University

Research Assistant, Econometrics

📍 Xiamen · Aug 2020 - Dec 2021

  • Assisted Jiong Zhu with land economic statistics research, using satellite imagery and visual features to study homesteads and land-use change.


📝 Selected Research

For a complete list of publications, please visit my Google Scholar profile

📈 View Citation Trend
Citation Trend

Note: * denotes equal contribution. Journal and conference papers shown here are first- or co-first-authored; technical-report roles are stated individually.

🧠 Representation and Predictive Learning 3
ICCV 2025
CCF A
TokenUnify: autoregressive pretraining objectives

TokenUnify: Scaling Up Autoregressive Pretraining for Neuron Segmentation Computer VisionSelf-Supervised Learning
ICCV · 2025
Yinda Chen*; Haoyuan Shi*; Xiaoyu Liu; Te Shi; Ruobing Zhang; Dong Liu; Zhiwei Xiong; Feng Wu

Code Dataset Weights

Autoregressive pretraining for volumetric neuron segmentation, combining three complementary prediction objectives with long-sequence modeling and an analysis of prediction-error accumulation.

IJCAI 2023
CCF A
dbMiM: pretraining and finetuning framework

Self-Supervised Neuron Segmentation with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Computer VisionSelf-Supervised Learning
IJCAI · 2023
Yinda Chen; Wei Huang; Shenglong Zhou; Qi Chen; Zhiwei Xiong

Code Pretraining data

Decision-based masked image modeling that learns masking policies through multi-agent reinforcement learning for neuron segmentation.

ICASSP 2024
CCF B
MS-Con, Figure 1: multiscale pretraining and segmentation framework

Learning Multiscale Consistency for Self-Supervised Electron Microscopy Instance Segmentation Computer VisionPretraining Methods
ICASSP · 2024
Yinda Chen; Wei Huang; Xiaoyu Liu; Shiyu Deng; Qi Chen; Zhiwei Xiong

Code

Self-supervised pretraining that encourages multiscale consistency in volumetric electron microscopy representations for neuron instance segmentation.

✨ Foundation Models, Multimodal Learning & Agents 8
IEEE TPAMI
GRCL: generative reference and conditional latent coding framework

Learned Image Coding with Generative Reference of Conditional Latents Image CompressionGenerative Models
IEEE TPAMI · Accepted October 2026
Siqi Wu*; Yinda Chen*; Weiming Chen; Dong Liu; K. C. Ho; Zhihai He

PDF Code

GRCL uses retrieved or generated images as references for conditional latent coding. The framework combines reference generation, latent matching and synthesis, and theoretical analysis of robustness to reference perturbations.

AAAI 2025
CCF A
CLC, Figure 1: conditional latent coding framework

Conditional Latent Coding with Learnable Synthesized Reference for Deep Image Compression Image Compression
AAAI · 2025
Siqi Wu*; Yinda Chen*; Dong Liu; Zhihai He

PDF Code Weights

Learnable reference synthesis from an external image dictionary improves conditional latent coding for learned image compression.

ICCV Workshop 2025
GTGM: generative text-guided pretraining framework

GTGM: Generative Text-Guided 3D Vision-Language Pretraining for Medical Image Segmentation Vision-LanguageMedical Imaging
ICCV Workshop on VLM3D · 2025
Yinda Chen*; Che Liu*; Wei Huang; Xiaoyu Liu; Haoyuan Shi; Sibo Cheng; Rossella Arcucci; Zhiwei Xiong

Code

Uses generated textual descriptions and negative-free contrastive learning to pretrain 3D medical image representations without paired medical text; evaluated through downstream segmentation on 10 CT/MRI datasets.

MICCAI 2024
CCF B
BIMCV-R: MedFinder image-text retrieval framework

BIMCV-R: A Landmark Dataset for 3D CT Text-Image Retrieval Vision-LanguageMultimodal Learning
MICCAI · 2024
Yinda Chen; Che Liu; Xiaoyu Liu; Rossella Arcucci; Zhiwei Xiong

Dataset Code

A dataset of 8,069 3D CT volumes with paired radiology reports, together with the MedFinder framework for bidirectional medical image–text retrieval.

NeurIPS 2024
CCF A
MaskFactory: mask editing and image generation framework

MaskFactory: Towards High-quality Synthetic Data Generation for Dichotomous Image Segmentation Multimodal Learning
NeurIPS · 2024
Haotian Qian*; Yinda Chen*; Shengtao Lou; Fahad Shahbaz Khan; Xiaogang Jin; Deng-Ping Fan

Project Code

A two-stage framework for generating paired images and masks for dichotomous image segmentation, expanding training data while preserving image–mask consistency.

IEEE JBHI
EMPOWER: evolutionary medical prompt optimization framework

EMPOWER: Evolutionary Medical Prompt Optimization With Reinforcement Learning Vision-LanguageMultimodal Learning
IEEE JBHI · 2025
Yinda Chen*; Yangfan He*; Jing Yang; Dapeng Zhang; Zhenlong Yuan; Muhammad Attique Khan; Jamel Baili; Por Lip Yee

Paper

Combines evolutionary prompt optimization with reinforcement learning and multi-dimensional evaluation for medical language tasks.

Technical Report 2026
IQuest-Q1 technical report, Figure 3: overall model architecture

IQuest-Q1: Advancing Foundation Capabilities for Agentic CLI Systems Agentic ModelsTool Use
Ubiquant (九坤投资) · October 2026
Yinda Chen, co-author

Report Project Code Models

A foundation model for command-line interaction, coding, and multi-step tool use. Contributed during my research internship at Ubiquant (九坤投资).

Technical Report 2026
SAIL report, Figure 4: science-aware improvement loop

SAIL: Scientific Agentic Intelligence via a Science-Aware Loop Scientific AgentsAgentic Models
Ubiquant (九坤投资) · October 2026
SAIL Model Team · Yinda Chen, core contributor

Report

A scientific-agent research project for literature research, scientific coding, and multi-step investigations, developed through a science-aware improvement loop.

🤖 World Models and Embodied Intelligence 2
Technical Report 2026
Pelican-Unified 1.0: unified embodied model overview

Pelican-Unified 1.0: A Unified Embodied Intelligence Model (UEI) for Understanding, Reasoning, Imagination and Action Embodied IntelligenceWorld ModelsUnified Models
X-Humanoid, WFM System Group · May 2026
Pelican-Unified Team · Yinda Chen, core contributor

Report Organization

My contribution: unified vision-language modeling and action capability.

A unified embodied model that combines scene and instruction understanding, task reasoning, and joint prediction of future video and robot actions.

Technical Report 2026
Pelican-VLA 0.5, Figure 2: model overview

Pelican-VLA 0.5: Attending Before Acting Benefits Generalization Vision-Language-ActionEmbodied IntelligenceWorld Models
X-Humanoid, WFM System Group · July 2026
Pelican-VLA Team · Yinda Chen, contributor

Report Code Models

The VLA component of Pelican-Unified connects vision-language understanding, future-frame generation, and action prediction through learnable bottleneck tokens. The work studies task-relevant attention and manipulation generalization.


🥇 Honors and Awards

🏅 National Awards & Research Funding 6
🎓 Academic Honors & Scholarships 2
🏆 Competition Awards 3


💬 Talks, Skills & Service

🎤 Talks & Presentations 3
2026
Connectome-scale chemical lateralization predicts asymmetric memory computation in the adult Drosophila mushroom body Society for Neuroscience (SfN) 2026 · Accepted poster
2023.03
Vision-Language Pretraining Using Generative Methods Invited talk, JD AI Team
2021.08
Data Mining: Clustering and Feature Extraction Course design and teaching, Xiamen University WISER Club
💻 Technical Skills
💻 Programming
Python C C++ MATLAB LaTeX
🧠 Deep Learning
PyTorch Transformers DeepSpeed DDP
📊 Data & Analysis
Pandas NumPy
🛠️ Tools & Infrastructure
Git Docker CUDA HPC
🌍 Languages
English (TOEFL 110) Chinese (Native)
🎓 Professional Service

Ad hoc reviewer for the following conferences and journals:

Computer Vision & Multimedia
CVPR 2025 ICCV 2025 WACV 2026 MICCAI 2025 ACM MM 2024
Machine Learning & AI
NeurIPS 2024 ICML 2025 ICLR 2024 AAAI AISTATS 2024
Journals
IJCV TIP


🎯 Hobbies & Interests

🎤 Singing
I enjoy singing and exploring different musical styles. Completed Singing Popular Music by Berklee College of Music.
🍳 Cooking
I enjoy trying new recipes and sharing meals with friends.
🏸 Sports
I play badminton, basketball, and table tennis, and enjoy working out.
🎲 Board Games
Favorites include Splendor, Catan, Ticket to Ride, Azul, 7 Wonders, Carcassonne, and Wingspan.
⛰️ Hiking & Traveling
I enjoy hiking and travel, including trips to Huangshan, Jiuhuashan, Zhuhai, Changsha, Istanbul, Morocco's Sahara, Seoul, and Singapore.
🎮 Gaming
I play Honor of Kings and contributed to Lingbao during my internship at Tencent IEG.

Happy to connect over music, board games, badminton, hiking, or a meal.

📬 Let's Connect

Get in Touch

📫 Email: cyd0806@mail.ustc.edu.cn

💼 I welcome research discussions and collaboration in machine learning, embodied intelligence, and connectomics.

📍 USTC Gaoxin campus, Hefei, Anhui, China

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