I am currently a senior researcher at Tencent. I obtained my Ph.D. (2021) and B.S. (2016) in Computer Science at Tsinghua University, advised by Guangwen Yang.

Previously I was a visiting researcher at Stanford, where I was fortunate to advised by Tengyu Ma. Before that, I spent three years of internship at Microsoft Research and worked closely with Lintao Zhang, Tao Qin and Li Zhao.

I am currently interested in research topics related to multimodal reasoning, agent, reinforcement learning, causal inference and their commercial applications. Email: lzcthu12[at]gmail.com

Publications & Preprints

(* indicates equal contribution)

• AdaptVision: Efficient Vision-Language Models via Adaptive Visual Acquisition
  Zichuan Lin*, Yicheng Liu*, Yang Yang, Lvfang Tao, Deheng Ye
  arXiv:2512.03794, 2025 [Project Page]

• SeeNav-Agent: Enhancing Vision-Language Navigation with Visual Prompt and Step-Level Policy Optimization
  Zhengcheng Wang*, Zichuan Lin*, Yijun Yang, Haobo Fu, Deheng Ye
  arXiv:2512.02631, 2025

• EntroPIC: Towards Stable Long-Term Training of LLMs via Entropy Stabilization with Proportional-Integral Control
  Kai Yang, Xin Xu, Yangkun Chen, Weijie Liu, Jiafei Lyu, Zichuan Lin, Deheng Ye, Saiyong Yang
  arXiv:2511.15248, 2025

• Multi-agent In-context Coordination via Decentralized Memory Retrieval
  Tao Jiang, Zichuan Lin, Lihe Li, Yi-Chen Li, Cong Guan, Lei Yuan, Zongzhang Zhang, Yang Yu, Deheng Ye
  AAAI 2026 (Oral)

• CausalMACE: Causality Empowered Multi-Agents in Minecraft Cooperative Tasks
  Qi Chai, Zhang Zheng, Junlong Ren, Deheng Ye, Zichuan Lin, Hao Wang
  EMNLP 2025

• Revisiting Discrete Soft Actor-Critic
  Haibin Zhou, Tong Wei, Zichuan Lin, Junyou Li, Deheng Ye, Qiang Fu, Wei Yang
  TMLR 2024

• CurrMask: Learning Versatile Skills with Automatic Masking Curricula
  Zhihui Xie, Yao Tang, Zichuan Lin, Deheng Ye, Shuai Li
  NeurIPS 2024

• Replay-enhanced Continual Reinforcement Learning
  Tiantian Zhang, Kevin Z. Shen, Zichuan Lin, Bo Yuan, Xueqian Wang, Xiu Li, Deheng Ye
  TMLR 2023

• A Survey on Transformers in Reinforcement Learning
  Wenzhe Li*, Hao Luo*, Zichuan Lin*, Chongjie Zhang, Zongqing Lu, Deheng Ye
  TMLR 2023

• Future-conditioned Unsupervised Pretraining for Decision Transformer
  Zhihui Xie, Zichuan Lin, Deheng Ye, Qiang Fu, Wei Yang, Shuai Li
  ICML 2023

• Dynamics-Adaptive Continual Reinforcement Learning via Progressive Contextualization
  Tiantian Zhang, Zichuan Lin, Yuxing Wang, Deheng Ye, Qiang Fu, Wei Yang, Xueqian Wang, Bin Liang, Bo Yuan, Xiu Li
  TNNLS 2023

• JueWu-MC: Playing Minecraft with Sample-efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
  Zichuan Lin*, Junyou Li*, Jianing Shi*, Deheng Ye, Qiang Fu, Wei Yang
  IJCAI 2022 (Long Oral top3%) (The champion solution of NeurIPS 2021 MineRL research competition)

• Model-based Adversarial Meta-Reinforcement Learning [code]
  Zichuan Lin, Garrett Thomas, Guangwen Yang, Tengyu Ma
  NeurIPS 2020

• RD$^2$: Reward Decomposition with Representation Decomposition
  Zichuan Lin*, Derek Yang*, Li Zhao, Tao Qin, Guangwen Yang, Tie-yan Liu
  NeurIPS 2020

• Episodic Reinforcement Learning with Associative Memory
  Guangxiang Zhu*, Zichuan Lin*, Guangwen Yang, and Chongjie Zhang
  ICLR 2020

• Object-Oriented Dynamics Learning through Multi-Level Abstraction
  Guangxiang Zhu*, Jianhao Wang*, Zhizhou Ren*, Zichuan Lin and Chongjie Zhang
  AAAI 2020

• Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning
  Zichuan Lin, Li Zhao, Derek Yang, Tao Qin, Guangwen Yang, and Tie-yan Liu
  NeurIPS 2019

• Fully Parameterized Quantile Function for Distributional Reinforcement Learning [code]
  Derek Yang, Li Zhao, Zichuan Lin, Jiang Bian, Tao Qin, and Tie-yan Liu
  NeurIPS 2019

• Episodic Memory Deep Q-Networks [code]
  Zichuan Lin, Tianqi Zhao, Guangwen Yang, and Lintao Zhang
  IJCAI 2018

Other Papers

• Sample Dropout: A Simple yet Effective Variance Reduction Technique in Deep Policy Optimization
  Zichuan Lin, Xiapeng Wu, Mingfei Sun, Deheng Ye, Qiang Fu, Wei Yang, Wei Liu
  

• Pretraining in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
  Zhihui Xie, Zichuan Lin, Junyou Li, Shuai Li, Deheng Ye
  

• Joint System-Wise Optimization for Pipeline Goal-Oriented Dialog System
  Zichuan Lin, Jing Huang, Bowen Zhou, Xiaodong He, Tengyu Ma
  

Awards & Honors

• 北京市优秀博士生, 2021.
• 清华国家奖学金 (Top 1%) , 2018 & 2020.
• 清华大学年度人物提名，每年20名, 2019.
• 清华微信公众号采访, 2018.
• 清华大学十佳优秀运动员，每年10名, 2017.
• 清华计算机系本科优秀毕业论文, 2016.
• 首都高校乒乓球比赛男子单打四连冠, 2013-2016.
• 全国中学生乒乓球锦标赛男子双打第三名, 2012.
• 乒乓球国家一级运动员, 2006 & 2012.
• 世界中学生乒乓球锦标赛团体冠军, 2011.