Jefferson Lin
林世杰 (Lín Shì Jié)

I'm a second-year undergraduate at MIT, pursuing a B.S. in Physics and Electrical Engineering with Computing. I am interested in training long-horizon agents to learn efficiently from demonstrations, and in the fast inference that makes them usable.

As an ML Engineer at Alpaca Research, I contributed to the infrastructure for long-horizon autonomous research agents and computer-use agents. Additionally, I have done research in two MIT CSAIL labs, spanning reinforcement learning, computer vision, and robotics. In the CLEAR Lab, I built ALERT to streamline robot data collection for VLAs, and in the InfoLab, I built Clicke, a desktop agent that automates everyday computer tasks.

Research Keywords: efficient inference, long-horizon agents, reinforcement learning, robot learning, learning from demonstration

Skills: I work across the ML stack in Python, C/C++, Rust, and TypeScript, training and fine-tuning models with PyTorch, LoRA, and RL and serving them efficiently with vLLM and quantization on GPU clusters. On the robotics side, I have deployed policies on a Franka arm, fine-tuned models for a Unitree Go2 robot dog, and built an autonomous robot with embedded vision and motor control. I also ship full-stack and desktop apps with React, Node, and Tauri.

Email  /  CV  /  LinkedIn  /  Github

profile photo
Alpaca Research CLEAR Lab MIT CSAIL InfoLab Harvard AI and Robotics Lab MIT CSAIL Y Combinator
News
Projects
AR headset view: translucent preview of the policy next action chunk on the Franka arm ALERT: Anticipating Learner Errors for Robot Teaching
Jefferson Lin, Amanda Cheng, Jason Liu, Jonas Sun, Nick Walker
CLEAR Lab, MIT CSAIL, 2026
system

We introduce ALERT, a data-collection system in which the policy being fine-tuned drives the robot, a detector on its π0.5 hidden states warns the operator before a failure, and an AR headset previews its next actions.

Clicke: Desktop Automation from a Single Demonstration
Jefferson Lin, Henry Lieberman
InfoLab, MIT CSAIL, 2025–2026

Clicke is a local-first macOS agent that learns a task from one demonstration and replays it by re-finding each click target on the live screen. Fine-tuning Qwen3-VL-2B with LoRA plus a two-step zoom raised macOS ScreenSpot-Pro grounding accuracy from 30.6% to 61.8%.

Figure 1: pass rates on 43 natural-language SlidesBench tasks across five demonstration formats Hierarchical Structure Beats Flat Action Logs
Jefferson Lin, Honjar Xing, Henry Lieberman
ICML Workshop on Deep Learning for Code (DL4C), 2026
arxiv

We introduce Agentic Goal Stacks, which organize a recorded demonstration into a hierarchy of named subgoals that an LLM agent can follow. On vaguely worded SlidesBench tasks, they raised the pass rate from 76.7% to 90.7%, compared with 86.0% for a flat action log, and ablations show that the subgoal grouping alone accounts for the gain.

A Fine-Tuning Pipeline for Robotic Dogs
AI & Robotics Lab, Harvard, 2025–2026
code

I built a LoRA fine-tuning pipeline that turns Qwen3-VL-2B into a navigation policy for the lab's Unitree Go2, mapping a camera image and an instruction to a discrete action.

Autonomous Can-Sorting Robot
MIT MASLAB, 2026
code

I coded the whole vision system for a fully autonomous can-sorting robot, a 7-class YOLOv8 detector fused with RealSense depth.

Dormsell
Full-stack web app, 2025
website

I developed a full-stack app for transactions, using React, Node/Express, Prisma, and Stripe.