About

Currently I am a first-year PhD student of School of Artificial Intelligence in Nanjing University advised by Prof. Chao Qian and a member of LAMDA Group, led by Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou.

My current research interest lies in self-evolving LLM agents and automated algorithm design with their applications in industrial scenarios (e.g., electronic design automation).
I am also committed to researching foundational methodologies in the field of artificial intelligence, such as evolutionary learning and reinforcement learning.

🔥 News

  • 🎉🎉 EvoStage, an novel evolutioanry LLM agent framework for automated algorithm design with strong versatility, is released on arXiv.

  • 🎉🎉 DACDMP is accepted by DATE'26.

  • 🎉🎉 Seq-MADAC is accepted by NeurIPS'25.

📝 Publications

📤 Preprint

  • Chen Lu, Ke Xue, Chengrui Gao, Yunqi Shi, Siyuan Xu, Mingxuan Yuan, Chao Qian & Zhi-Hua Zhou.. Advancing Automated Algorithm Design via Evolutionary Stagewise Design with LLMs. arXiv:2603.07970. [Paper]

📈 Conference

  • Chen Lu, Ke Xue, Ruotong Chen, Yunqi Shi, Siyuan Xu, Mingxuan Yuan, Chao Qian, Zhi-hua Zhou. Dynamic Algorithm Configuration for Global Placement In: Proceedings of the Design, Automation & Test in Europe 2026 (DATE’25). [Paper]

  • Chen Lu, Ke Xue, Lei Yuan, Yao Wang, Yaoyuan Wang, Sheng Fu, Chao Qian. Sequential Multi-Agent Dynamic Algorithm Configuration. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 39 (NuerIPS’25). [arXiv]

📚 Journal

  • Coming soon...

💬 Project Experiences

  • AI for EDA, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab. (One patent granted, with the code integrated into commercial-grade EDA software.)

  • Partial Attention TCP Testing Based on Graph Optimization Program Representation and Testing Overhead, Jiangsu Provincial College Students' Innovation Training Program. (The grade is rated as Good.)

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • Second Prize in "Citi Cup" AI-empowered Financial Innovation Application Competition.

📪 Services

Conference Reviewer:


  • SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences: 2026

  • IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine: 2026

  • ICML: 2025

📖 Education

  • – Present, Ph.D. student in the School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University.

  • – , Undergraduate in the School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University.