Michael Chen

Hi! I'm a junior at CMU studying CS. In my free time, I like playing baseball, lifting weights, and playing jazz trombone. Currently I'm researching flexible tokenizers for world models under Prof. Max Simchowitz.

Some things I've worked on:

• Gated Linear Attention in Needle for 10-714. I wrote GLA in my own Needle deep learning library with both the recurrent and chunkwise algorithms. My chunkwise code reached 100x speedup over recurrent.
• Not-Just-Scaling Laws: Towards a Better Understanding of the Downstream Impact of Language Model Design Decisions (EMNLP 2025)
• Tetris bot for 17-740. I added 1-step lookahead with beam search to a heuristic algorithm and added some speed optimizations to reach >20M lines cleared.
• Baseball batting simulator in Unreal Engine 4
• Eye health app with >18k downloads
• Curriculum-planning tool for my high school