Ethan Lei (雷易锟)

China

Per aspera ad astra. Working on machine translation, LLM-based agents, and self-evolving agents.

Research Interests

Machine Translation

Document-level neural machine translation, speech translation, and image translation — exploring high-quality translation under long-context and multimodal settings.

LLM-based Agent

Long-horizon task solving, complex reasoning, and multi-tool use — studying agents' planning, execution, and collaboration in real-world tasks.

Self-evolving Agent

Self-feedback, self-improvement, and continual learning — exploring agents' capacity for autonomous evolution in long-horizon tasks and tool use.

Publications

DecEx-RAG: Boosting Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Decision and Execution Optimization via Process Supervision

Yongqi Leng, Yikun Lei, Xikai Liu, Meizhi Zhong, Bojian Xiong, Yurong Zhang, Yan Gao, Yao Hu, Deyi Xiong

EMNLP 2025 (Industry)

Think-Search-Patch: A Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Framework for Repository-Level Code Repair

Bojian Xiong, Yikun Lei, Xikai Liu, Shaowei Zhang, Pengyun Zhu, Yan Liu, Yongqi Leng, Ling Shi, Meizhi Zhong, Yurong Zhang, Yan Gao, Yao Hu, Deyi Xiong

EMNLP 2025 (Industry)

ZigZagKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression for Long-context Modeling based on Layer Uncertainty

Meizhi Zhong, Xikai Liu, Chen Zhang, Yikun Lei, Yan Gao, Yao Hu, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang

COLING 2025

Experience

Algorithm Engineer

ByteDance  · Full-time

Sep 2025 - Present

China

Building the AI search content supply system and optimizing Agentic RL algorithms.

Algorithm Engineer

Xiaohongshu  · Full-time

Nov 2023 - Sep 2025

China

Built LLM-based Agent systems and a generative AI search engine.

Quantitative Research Intern

Xuming Capital  · Internship

Aug 2023 - Nov 2023

China

End-to-end mid-to-high-frequency factor mining.

Algorithm Research Intern

OPPO Research Institute  · Internship

Sep 2022 - Aug 2023

China

Research on end-to-end speech translation and LLM-enhanced machine translation.

M.S. · Natural Language Processing

Sep 2021 - Mar 2024

China

TJUNLP Lab, advised by Prof. Deyi Xiong. Research in document-level neural machine translation.

Exchange Student · Informatics

Hokkaido University

Sep 2019 - Jan 2020

Japan

B.E. · Software Engineering

Northeastern University

Sep 2017 - Sep 2021

China