A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Hello! I’m Yikun Lei (Ethan Lei), and you can also call me Kunkun — a technology explorer who believes in following intuition and passion.

I received my Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Northeastern University (2017–2021). I then completed my Master’s degree at Tianjin University (2021–2024), where I was fortunate to conduct research on Natural Language Processing at the TJUNLP Lab under the guidance of Prof. Deyi Xiong.

Currently, I’m on a journey of exploring life’s possibilities, in pursuit of the next technological paradigm.

My research interests mainly focus on:

  • 🌟 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.

  1. ByteDance Now

    🧑‍💻 Algorithm Engineer

    Responsible for building the AI search content supply system and optimizing Agentic RL algorithms.

  2. Xiaohongshu Inc

    🧑‍💻 Algorithm Engineer

    responsible for building LLM-based Agent systems and generative AI search engine.

  3. Xuming Capital

    🧑‍💻 Intern

    Responsible for end-to-end mid-to-high-frequency factor mining.

  4. OPPO Research Institute

    🧑‍💻 Intern

    Engaged in research on End-to-End Speech Translation and LLM-enhanced Machine Translation.

  5. Tianjin University

    🧑‍🎓 Student

    Conducted research in Document-level Machine Translation.

  6. Hokkaido University

    🧑‍🎓 Exchange

    Software Engineering.

  7. Northeastern University

    🧑‍🎓 Student

    Software Engineering.