Fengdi Che

PhD Candidate | University of Alberta
(514) 578-9225 | fengdi at ualberta dot ca
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Education

University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
Doctor of Philosophy, Statistical Machine Learning | GPA: 3.92/4.0
2021 - 2026 (Expected August)
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Rupam Mahmood (Co-Supervisor), Dr. Dale Schuurmans (Co-Supervisor), Dr. Csaba Szepesvári

McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Master of Science in Computer Science | CGPA: 3.71/4.0
2018 - 2021
Supervisor: Dr. Doina Precup

McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Bachelor of Science, Honours Applied Mathematics | CGPA: 3.95/4.0
2014 - 2018

Internships

Netflix, Los Gatos, CA, US | October 2025 - Present
Developing LLM-based recommendation system to improve content discovery.

Shanghai AI Lab, Shanghai, China | March 2025 - August 2025

• Generated data using proprietary LLM APIs
• Designed rule-based rewards and post-trained a verifiable code LLM agent
• Built training infrastructure on top of VeRL and investigated generalization ability of LLM under continuous latent CoT

Scholarships and Honours

• Verna Tate Graduate Scholarship in Science
• First Class Honours in Applied Mathematics
• Jenne Bell Science Undergraduate Research Award
• Jurate Tanner Scholarship in Science
• ICML 2024 Spotlight (3.5% acceptance rate)

Talks

Tutorial Speaker, AAAI Conference, Philadelphia, PA | February 2025

• Organized a diverse international team of postdoc associates and professors
• Bridged the gap between theoretical and empirical research and identified fundamental challenges in offline reinforcement learning

Invited Speaker, Google DevFest, Edmonton, AB | November 2022

• Explained frontier reinforcement learning studies to undergraduate students and software developers

Service

Volunteer Sub-Team Lead, Conference on Learning Theory, Edmonton, AB | June 2024

• Managed logistics for the poster session, including venue coordination and vendor management

Breakout Session Organizer, Women in Machine Learning Workshop, Honolulu, HI | July 2023

• Invited participants interested in making reinforcement learning more applicable, including professors and senior researchers from Nvidia, DeepMind, Microsoft, and HuggingFace
• Organized discussions by proposing several open questions

Reviewer for CoLLAs, ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS

Teaching Experience

CMPUT 499 Independent Study Co-instructor, University of Alberta | September 2024 - December 2024

• Designed graduate-level course materials and guided an independent study student’s research

Master Student’s Mentor, University of Alberta | October 2022 - April 2023

• Provided the fundamental idea and supported the student with several contributions and suggestions
• Guided the student to finish and publish the project, which was then used for his master’s thesis

Teaching Assistant, University of Alberta and McGill University

• Consistently recognized in student feedback for providing clear, helpful, and friendly support

Research Interests

Reinforcement Learning, Off-Policy Learning, Continual Learning, Self-Evolving Agents, LLM Reasoning and Generalization, LLM Post-training

Computer Skills

Languages: Python, Matlab, Java
Frameworks: veRL, vLLM, TRL, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray