Annie S. Chen

Hi! I am a fourth-year computer science PhD student at Stanford University advised by Prof. Chelsea Finn and affiliated with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). I am supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an OpenAI Superalignment Fellowship.

I recently spent six months as a full-time student researcher at Google DeepMind in London. Previously, in 2021, I received a joint B.S. in math and M.S. in computer science, both also at Stanford. I was also a research intern at Google Brain, where I learned a lot working with Pete Florence.

I am originally from Boulder, Colorado, and outside of research, I enjoy spending time outdoors (hiking and backpacking), playing tennis, and learning to play the guitar. For three years I organized the Stanford CS Undergraduate Mentoring Program to help undergraduate students get involved with computer science research.

My research focuses on developing robust and adaptable machine learning systems that are capable of handling distribution shifts and efficiently respond to new information. I am excited by a broad range of machine learning topics, including robustness and adaptation to distribution shifts, reinforcement learning, and embodied AI. In particular, here are some problems I've been working on recently:

1. Understanding and Manipulating Data Distributions:
   • How does the composition and quality of training data influence robustness, and how do we manipulate the data distribution to expose models to the right information?
2. On-The-Fly Adaptation:
   • What are approaches that effectively leverage prior knowledge and foundation models to adapt behavior at test time? How do we develop good signals for steering behavior during deployment?
3. Autonomous Improvement:
   • What are effective methods to facilitate models to learn and generalize from their own behavior? How do we effectively train and fine-tune models leveraging failures, self-generated feedback, and prior experience, and how do we provide or generate useful data for this process?

Please feel free to reach out about research or any advice I can help with!

[Email] [CV] [Google Scholar] [Twitter] [LinkedIn] [GitHub]

Please see my CV or Google Scholar for a full list of work.