Hi! This is Yuanjun Chai 柴源君 (sounds like Y-wen Joon, Ch-eye), aka Allen. I just received my MSECE from the University of Washington Seattle
in August 2026 (Go Huskies!).
I graduated with highest honors from Xidian University, earning a bachelor’s degree. My thesis on image inpainting received invaluable support from Chao Dong from SIAT-CAS 
. Also, I am so lucky to have the privilege of collaborating with Chao Dong and Yu Qiao from CAS 
working on image&video super-resolution,Yue Gao from Tsinghua University 
working on event-camera.
Previously, I worked as a machine learning engineer for 5 years at IT companies, such as VMware AI Lab 
, focusing on LLM, agent, and RAG. Before this, I worked at YeahMobi—an affiliate of Alibaba Group 
—as a machine learning engineer. I was responsible for all technical development of the AIGC platform Kreado AI 
, including video creation, virtual avatar, and more.
Research Interests:
- LLM: LM agent, RLVR, LM Pluralistic Alignment, MoE
- Multi-modality: world model, Vision-Language Model (VLM)
Beyond research, I also want to turn new technologies into products that make people’s lives better. Thus, I co-founded a start-up, INGREM Inc., to help high-paraplegia disabled people use a computer with a precise eye-control platform.
I am currently seeking full-time roles in AI research and engineering (Industry/Academia), available from September 2026. Feel free to reach out!
🔥 News
- 2026.09: Just received my MSECE from UW Seattle. Open to new opportunities!
- 2026.06: Just wrapped up my internship with the TikTok TnS team!
- 2026.01: 🥰🥰 Excited to start the internship with the TikTok TnS team!
- 2025.11: 🔥🔥🔥 Our paper Artificial Hivemind about Language Model Homogeneity, received the NeurIPS Best Paper Award! See you in San Diego!
- 2025.10: 🎉🎉 Received UW Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award and UW ECE Student Professional Development Award, to support attending ICCV at Hawaii.
- 2025.09: 🔥🔥 Our paper Artificial Hivemind about Large Language Model Homogeneity pattern, has been accepted by NeurIPS Oral (DB Track)! See you in San Diego!
- 2025.06: 🔥🔥 Our paper DiffPure-VLM about Vision-Language Model Safeguarding, has been accepted by ICCV25! See you in Hawaii! 🏖️
- 2024.09: 🥰🥰 Go to University of Washington! I am so excited to start my new research journey in UW!
- 2022.07: 🎉🎉 Thrilled to join VMware as ans MLE! We do some interesting projects on our own LLM platform like h2oGPT (⭐️8k+).
- 2021.03: 👏👏 Rank 10 / 60 in NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring in CVPR 2021 and our method Visual Token Transformer for Image Restoration was selected for presentation in the summary paper.
- 2021.01: 🥰🥰 Our eyes control platform has helped more than 300 people with paraplegia!
- 2020.08: 🎉🎉 Our IKC – CVPR project about real-world super-resolution has received more than ⭐️200+.
📝 Research
Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)
Liwei Jiang, Yuanjun Chai, Margaret Li, Mickel Liu, Raymond Fok, Maarten Sap, Yulia Tsvetkov, Nouha Dziri, Alon Albalak, Yejin Choi
NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Award
- Uncovered and analyzed the “Artificial Hivemind” effect, demonstrating significant intra-model repetition and inter-model homogeneity in current language models. Introduced $\infty$-Chats, the first large-scale (26K queries) dataset of real-world open-ended user queries, and developed a comprehensive taxonomy (6 categories, 17 subcategories) for LLM prompts.
Jiawei Wang*, Yushen Zuo*, Yuanjun Chai, Zhendong Liu, Yicheng Fu, Yichun Feng, Kin-Man Lam
ICCV 2025
Project | 
- Our Robust-VLGuard dataset and DiffPure-VLM defense framework tackle the vulnerability of visual language models (VLMs) to adversarial perturbation attacks. By combining Gaussian noise enhancement and diffusion model-based adversarial noise conversion, we demonstrably improve VLM robustness, even against strong attacks.
NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring
Seungjun Nah, Sanghyun Son, Suyoung Lee, Radu Timofte, Kyoung Mu Lee, Yushen Zuo, Yuanjun Chai et al.
CVPR 2021 workshop
- We propose a new method, Visual Token Transformer for Image Restoration, for image deblurring in the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring, which achieves a top-10 place on the leaderboard.
🖥️ Industrial Experience
🧑🎨 AIGC (Generative Model)
Kreado AI: AIGC Platform for Marketing Content Generation
Yuanjun Chai and YeahMobi.inc
- We propose a new AIGC platform for marketing content generation, named Kreado AI. Kreado AI is a hybrid worldwide AIGC platform that combines the strengths of so many AIGC functions:
- Virtual Avatar (talking-face generation, speech synthesis, LLM)
- AI model (text-to-image, LoRA, control net)
- Custom clone services (image-to-video, voice clone)
- Here I mainly focused on the Virtual Avatar and AI model algorithms improvement, as well as collaborateed with system architects for entire architecture improvement. Users span to Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, with quarterly revenue exceeding US$1 million.
🧙♂️ RAG-based LLM
h2o GPT: AIGC Platform for Marketing Content Generation
Yuanjun Chai
Project | 
- We develop a new RAG-based LLM platform for AI cloud native and private AI. The platform could leverage diverse LLMs with extended dataset such as pdf, code base, dataset and internet links. Here I am responsible for all RAG-based LLM algorithm development, as well as industrial deployment. Functionality includes:
- text QA and chat with RAG
- multi-modal QA and chat
- AI agent
- Multi-modal LLM for AI cloud native.
👨⚕️ AI healthcare & Charity
Face Control: Precise Facial-Control Platform for People with Paraplegia
Yuanjun Chai, Ingrem.inc
- I co-founded a start-up, Ingrem, together with a few other hardcore engineers. Our goal was to build a complete smart bed that supports both daily living and entertainment for people with high-level paraplegia. Within the team, I led the software development — an eye- and facial-control platform. Powered by computer vision algorithms, it lets users drive the mouse and keyboard precisely through subtle facial movements of the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth. Together, the platform and the bed make everyday computer use and social connection far more accessible. We truly believe technology makes people’s lives better — and we are making it happen!
🎖 Honors and Awards
- NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Award
- UW ECE Student Professional Development Award.
- UW Graduate Student Conference Presentation Award.
- Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award (10/5000), Topic: Image Inpainting Based on Deep Learning.
- Gold Medal of National Computer Design Contest – Birdsong Recognition with Machine Learning.
🧑⚖️ Academic Service
Conference Reviewer:
- NeurIPS 2026, NeurIPS ED 2026
- ACL ARR May 2026 (EMNLP 2026)
- CVPR 2026, ECCV 2026
🎓 Education
- 2024.09 - 2026.08, Master of Science in Electrical and Computing Engineering (MSECE), University of Washington, Seattle
- 2015.08 - 2019.06, Undergraduate, Xidian University.
- 2018.08 - 2018.09, Summer Exchange Program, University of Cambridge (with Prof. Pietro Lio). Rank 1/53, fully-funded Cambridge Trust Scholarship.
🧑💻 Professional Experience
- 2022.07 - 2024.09, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, VMware AI Lab
- 2020.07 - 2022.07, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, YeahMobi – Alibaba Group.
- 2019.05 - 2020.07, Research Assistant at CAS, Tsinghua University
🏃♂️ Hobbies
My hobbies include Fencing🤺, Basketball🏀, Swimming🏊, Guitar🎸 and Motorcycle🏍️. In the high school, I won my first gold medal in Fencing🤺 at the National Province Games🏅.
I also have a lovely cat🐱 – Luna:
