Sikuan Yan

Ph.D. Candidate in Artificial Intelligence @ LMU Munich

prof_pic.jpg

LMU Munich

Munich, Germany

yan@dbs.ifi.lmu.de

Hi, there! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Artificial Intelligence at LMU Munich, advised by Prof. Volker Tresp. My research focuses on agent memory, agentic RL, multi-agent systems, agent harnessing, and multimodal agents.

I am also a researcher at the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) — one of Germany’s six national AI Competence Centers.

Previously, I earned my M.Sc. in Informatics at LMU Munich and my B.Sc. in Informatics at TUM Munich.

I love mentoring and regularly supervise motivated Master’s and Bachelor’s students, and I always do my best to help them grow and land the strongest possible next position. If you’d like to work with me on agents, memory, or agentic RL, feel free to reach out by email — I’m always happy to chat. You can also see where my past students are now.

Research Interests: Agentic RL Agent Memory Multi-Agent Systems Multimodal Agents Agent Harnessing

news

Sep 10, 2026 Invited talk to the JPMorgan Chase Global AI team, with team members from New York, London, Palo Alto, Madrid, and Paris.
Aug 21, 2026 4 papers have been accepted by EMNLP 2026 🎉
May 20, 2026 New paper out: Memory-R2: Fair Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon Memory-Augmented LLM Agents. 📝
May 16, 2026 New paper out: PyraVid: Hierarchical Multimodal Memory for Long-Horizon Video Reasoning. 🎥
Apr 30, 2026 EchoRL: Reinforcement Learning via Rollout Echoing accepted to ICML 2026 🎉
Apr 04, 2026 Memory-R1 (Main) and Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation (Findings) accepted to ACL 2026 🎉
Aug 27, 2025 Memory-R1 went viral! It was shared by a major tech influencer on X (~100K views) and featured by MarkTechPost. 🚀
Aug 15, 2025 TCP: A Benchmark for Temporal Constraint-Based Planning accepted to EMNLP 2025 (Main) 🎉

selected publications

  1. Memory-R2: Fair Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon Memory-Augmented LLM Agents
    Sikuan Yan, Ahmed Bahloul, Ercong Nie, Susanna Schwarzmann, and 3 more authors
    Under review, 2026
  2. EMNLP 2026 Main
    PyraVid: Hierarchical Multimodal Memory for Long-Horizon Video Reasoning
    Sikuan Yan, Sicheng Dong, Haotong Wang, Ercong Nie, and 7 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Main Conference, 2026
  3. ICML 2026
    EchoRL: Reinforcement Learning via Rollout Echoing
    Jinhe Bi, Aniri, Minglai Yang, Xingcheng Zhou, Wenke Huang, Sikuan Yan, and 6 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
  4. ACL 2026 Main
    Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning
    Sikuan Yan, Xiufeng Yang, Zuchao Huang, Ercong Nie, and 9 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Main Conference, 2026
  5. ACL 2026 Findings
    Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation
    Xiaowen Ma, Yunpu Ma, Chenyang Lin, Sikuan Yan, and 5 more authors
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Findings), 2026
  6. EMNLP 2025
    TCP: A Benchmark for Temporal Constraint-Based Planning
    Zifeng Ding, Sikuan Yan, Moy Yuan, Xianglong Hu, and 2 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025

supervised master students

  • Xiufeng Yang — now PhD candidate at TUM, advised by Prof. Nassir Navab
    Thesis: Agentic RL + Memory
  • Sicheng Dong — now ML Scientist at SAP
    Thesis: Multimodal Memory
  • Ahmed Bahloul — now PhD candidate at TUM, advised by Prof. Daniel Cremers and Dr. Yunpu Ma
    Thesis: Multi-step RL + Memory

I’m grateful for the chance to work with these talented students, and I always do my best to help them land the strongest possible next position. Feel free to reach out to any of them to hear about their experience.