Hi! I am a final-year PhD student in CS Department at ucsb. I'm incredibly lucky to be advised by Prof. Misha Sra, whose support has been invaluable in my research journey. My research explores how large language and multimodal models can reason, collaborate, and adapt safely in complex environments. I work at the intersection of agentic AI, trust and interpretability, and data infrastructure for reasoning models, aiming to make intelligent systems more transparent, efficient, and reliable.

Previously, I was a Student Researcher at Google, where I worked on agentic system and reinforcement learning for LLMs.

My research focuses on:
1. Agentic & Collaborative LLMs: modeling coordination, planning, and reasoning among intelligent agents.
2. Transparent and Trustworthy AI : making model reasoning processes interpretable and auditable.
3. Data-Centric AI: designing human-aligned datasets for post-training and evaluation.
4. Human-AI Co-Reasoning: enabling safe and adaptive interaction in scientific, creative, and high-stakes settings.

I am open to collaborations and always excited to chat about research ideas. Please feel free to reach out to me at zichen_chen [at] ucsb.edu.