Chao Lei


Hi there! 👋 I’m a PhD Candidate in the AI and Autonomy Lab at The University of Melbourne, under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Nir Lipovetzky, and Assoc. Prof. Kris Ehinger

My research focuses on AI planning, its application in large language models (LLMs), and LLM reasoning.

Feel free to contact me in case you have interest or questions regarding my work. 🤝

📮Email: clei1@student.unimelb.edu.au

📖 Publications

2025

  • Chao Lei, Krista A Ehinger, Yanchuan Chang, Nir Lipovetzky. From Reasoning to Generalization: Knowledge-Augmented LLMs for ARC Benchmark (Arxiv 2025)
  • Chao Lei, Yanchuan Chang, Nir Lipovetzky, Krista A Ehinger Planning-Driven Programming: A Large Language Model Programming Workflow In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025 (ACL, Main Track, 2025)
  • Chao Lei, Nir Lipovetzky, Krista A Ehinger State-Based Disassembly Planning In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025 ( AAAI 2025)
  • Yanbei Jiang, Yihao Ding, Chao Lei, Jiayang Ao, Jey Han Lau, Krista A Ehinger Beyond Perception: Evaluating Abstract Visual Reasoning through Multi-Stage Task In Findings of the ACL, 2025 ( ACL, Findings, 2025)

    • 2024

  • Chao Lei, Nir Lipovetzky, Krista A Ehinger Generalized Planning for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024 ( AAAI 2024)

    • 2023

  • Chao Lei, Nir Lipovetzky, Krista A Ehinger Novelty and Lifted Helpful Actions in Generalized Planning In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 2023 ( SoCS 2023)

    • 2021

  • Chao Lei, Nir Lipovetzky Width-based backward search In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2021 ( ICAPS 2021)

    • Academic Service

  • Conference Publicity Chair: ICAPS 2025
  • Paper Reviewer: ICAPS, AAAI

    • 🎓 Education

    University of Melbourne

    📍 Melbourne · Victoria · Australia

    PhD Candidate in AI and Autonomy
    School of Computing and Information Systems
    2022 - Present

    University of Melbourne

    📍 Melbourne · Victoria · Australia

    Master of Science (Computer Science)
    School of Science
    2019 - 2021

    Northwestern Polytechnical University

    📍 Xi'an · Shaanxi · China

    Bachelor of Aircraft Design and Engineering
    School of Aeronautics

    985&211, Double First-Class A+

    2012 - 2016

    📖 Experience

    Academic Tutor - University of Melbourne

    COMP90054 AI Planning and Autonomy

  • Search, Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), Markov Decision Process (MDP), Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), Reinforcement Learning (RL), Game Theory
    • 2024 sesmeter 2 & 2025 semester 1

    Master's Thesis Co-Supervisor - University of Melbourne

  • Master in Computer Science: Liao Cao [H1] (2025)
  • Master in Information Technology: Jikun Yang (2024)

    • Full Stack Development - RMIT University.

    📍 Melbourne · Victoria · Australia   👩‍💻 Part - time

  • Full stack development for CORE Journal/Conference Ranking
    • June 2019 - Feb 2022

    🎙️ Invited Talks

    University of Southern California - Los Angeles.

  • Novelty and Generalized Planning
    • 2023

    University of Toronto - Canada.

  • Generalized Planning for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus
    • 2024

    Oracle

  • Planning-Driven Programming: A Large Language Model Programming Workflow
    • 2025

    🏆 Awards & Scholarships