Yiren Lu

Welcome! I am currently a Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer at Waymo Research, where I develop machine learning agents for autonomous driving motion planning and multi-agent simulation. My research involves reinforcement learning, imitation learning, data-driven simulation and foundation models. I had the pleasure of collaborating closely with Sergey Levine on deep RL methods applied to learning driving behavior policies.

Prior to Waymo, I was a software engineer at Google Search, the Assistant team. I dedicated 20% time to working with the Brain-Robotics team on robotic learning from demonstrations. Before that, I obtained a Master's degree in Robotics from GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, advised by Prof. Daniel D. Lee. I interned at Google, Microsoft Research, and Morgan Stanley.

My research interests are broadly in machine learning and robotics. I am particularly interested in advancing learning techniques that enable safe, reliable and generalizable intelligent agents capable of autonomous reasoning, planning, and decision-making to address real-world challenges.