I recently joined Amazon as an Applied scientist. I got my Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, advised by Dr. Yixin Chen. For details, check out my CV. My recent focuses are on advancing harness and LLM Self-Evolution, and I am working on its productionization on AWS.

🔥 News

• 2026.09:  🔥🔥 Consilience for Verifier-Free Test-Time Scaling was accepted by NeurIPS 2026! We propose consilience to balance exploration and confirmation as a temporal signal in the reasoning trace. Many thanks to my collaborators Like Hui, Haitao Mao, and Jun Huan!
• 2026.07:  🔥🔥 Round-trip Reinforcement Learning was accepted by COLM 2026! We designed a round-trip optimization goal for chemical model self-improvement, we are working on extending it to more general cases like coding. Checkout our paper here RTRL!
• 2025.01:  🔥🔥 GOFA was accepted by ICLR2025!

📝 Selected Publications

(* Equal contribution)

• NeurIPS 2026 Consilience for Verifier-Free Test-Time Scaling, Lecheng Kong, Like Hui, Haitao Mao, Jun Huan
• COLM 2026 Round-trip Reinforcement Learning: Self-Consistent Training for Better Chemical LLMs, Lecheng Kong, Xiyuan Wang, Yixin Chen, Muhan Zhang
• ICLR 2025 GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling, Lecheng Kong*, Jiarui Feng*, Hao Liu*, Chengsong Huang, Jiaxin Huang, Yixin Chen, Muhan Zhang
• ICLR 2024 One for All: Towards Training One Graph Model for All Classification Tasks, Hao Liu*, Jiarui Feng*, Lecheng Kong*, Ningyue Liang, Dacheng Tao, Yixin Chen, Muhan Zhang
• WWW 2024 Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks, Hao Liu, Jiarui Feng, Lecheng Kong, Dacheng Tao, Yixin Chen, Muhan Zhang

💻 Internships

• 2024.05 - 2024.08, Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon, Santa Clara.
• 2019.05 - 2019.08, Software Engineer Intern, Google, Mountain View.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2022/2023 NeurIPS travel award.
• 2007.08 Chunjianghuayue Young Residents Swimming Competition, Runner-up.

🤝 Services

• Reviewer for conferences: CVPR23/24; NeurIPS23/24/25/26; ICLR24/25/26；KDD24/25; ECCV24; ICML25 (Gold reviewer)

📖 Educations

• 2020.09 - 2025.05, Ph.D., Computer Science, Washington University in St. Louis.
• 2016.09 - 2020.06, Bachelor’s/Master’s, Computer Science, Washington University in St. Louis.
• 2010.9 - 2016.06, High School, Academic, Hangzhou Foreign Language School.

Personal

• I am from Hangzhou, China.
• I enjoy badminton🏸, skiing⛷️ and climbing🧗.
• Game enthusiast with horrible gaming skills.