Ethan Lin

Ethan Lin

Incoming CMS PhD Student at Caltech

I am an incoming CMS PhD student at Caltech advised by Yisong Yue . I'm broadly interested in AI for scientific discovery, currently focused on leveraging agents for automating bottlenecks in scientific analysis pipelines. Previously, I received my B.S. in Computer Science at Cornell University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Jennifer J. Sun .

News

Joined the BeeryLab at MIT as a visiting researcher.

Presenting Simple Agents at CVPR 2026.

Graduated from Cornell University.

Accepted to 4 PhD programs! (Caltech, MIT, UPenn, Cornell)

Won Best Poster Award at the Visual Concepts Workshop @ CVPR 2025!

Publications

Selected papers and ongoing research.

In Submission to NeurIPS 2026

AgentSSL: Can MLE Agents Leverage Unlabeled Data?

A. Sarkar*, E. Lin* , Z. Liu, K. Branson, J. J. Sun

COLM 2026

A case study of evaluating AI agents on a neuroscience data-to-discovery pipeline

K. A. Horstmann, E. Lin , A. A. Robie, J. J. Sun, K. Branson

In Submission to ECCV Workshop 2026

WildFin: An In-the-Wild Video Dataset from Underwater Ecology Pipelines

A. Grassick, J. T. Hsu, E. Lin , Z. Liu, M. Whitton, M. Hair, L. Gutierrez, H. Yu, K. Branson, V. Jayaraman, M. A. Gil, A. M. Hein, J. J. Sun

CVPR 2026

Simple Agents Outperform Experts in Biomedical Imaging Workflow Optimization

X. Wang, K. A. Horstmann, E. Lin , J. Chen, A. R. Farhang, S. Stiles, A. Sehgal, J. Light, D. Van Valen, Y. Yue, J. J. Sun

VisCon @ CVPR 2025
Best Poster Award

Beyond Accuracy: Metrics that Uncover what Makes a 'Good' Visual Descriptor

E. Lin , L. Zhao, A. Sehgal, J. J. Sun

Teaching

CS 4782: Introduction to Deep Learning

Teaching Assistant · Cornell University

SP 2026

CS 4620: Introduction to Computer Graphics

Teaching Assistant · Cornell University

FA 2026

CS 3780: Introduction to Machine Learning

Teaching Assistant · Cornell University

FA 2024, SP 2025

CS 2110: Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures

Teaching Assistant · Cornell University

SP 2024

Awards

  • CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention 2025-2026
  • Best Poster Award at Visual Concepts Workshop @ CVPR 2025 2025
  • Cornell Dean's List All Semesters