I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University (2020 – present), supervised by Prof. Andrew Perrault and Prof. Zhihui Zhu. Prior to that, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Xidian University in 2020.

My research interests include deep reinforcement learning (RL), large language models (LLMs), and AI agents. I am actively seeking Summer 2026 AI/ML Internships; if you would like to consider me for a position, please email me at chen.10183@buckeyemail.osu.edu.

📝 Publications

• RLC 2025 Understanding Learned Representations and Action Collapse in Visual Reinforcement Learning, Xi Chen, Zhihui Zhu, Andrew Perrault.

• AAAI 2025 The Distributional Reward Critic Framework for Reinforcement Learning Under Perturbed Rewards, Xi Chen, Zhihui Zhu, Andrew Perrault.

• ML4H 2023 Using Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Objective Cluster-Level Optimization of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for Infectious Disease, Xueqiao Peng, Jiaqi Xu, Xi Chen, Dinh Song An Nguyen, Andrew Perrault.

🤖 Current Research Project

Motivation. We hypothesize that the current RLVR setting is constrained by limited exploration.

Ongoing. We are developing a new fine-tuning algorithm that augments RLVR with an SFT phase to encourage exploration.

🎖 Awards

• 2025 Eleanor Quinlan Graduate Teaching Award, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University

⭐ Services

• 2025, Student Volunteer, AAAI.
• 2021, Student Volunteer, IEEE VIS.

📖 Teaching

• Spring 2023 - present: Introduction to Computing Technology (CSE 1110)
• Summer 2022: Introduction to Computer Programming in C++ for Engineers and Scientists (CSE 1222)
• Autumn 2021, Spring 2022: Computer Game and Animation Techniques (CSE 3541)