PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jiachen Sun

Jiachen Sun is a computer scientist whose research spans autonomous-vehicle security, multimodal perception, and language models. He coauthored work on LiDAR spoofing, self-supervised 3D point-cloud robustness, and attacks on vehicle-trajectory prediction, then coauthored CALICO, Dolphins, and Cocoon. He earned an information-engineering B.S.E. at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, studied at the University of Washington, and completed a computer science and engineering Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2023 before starting work at TikTok. Since December 2024, he has been a senior machine learning scientist on LinkedIn's Core AI team, where he works on large language models and agentic reinforcement learning.

Now at
LinkedIn
Works
28
Citations
567
h-index
10
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2020

    A LiDAR spoofing defense

    In 2020, he coauthors a USENIX Security study of black-box spoofing attacks on autonomous-vehicle LiDAR and proposes CARLO, which detects spoofed data through ignored occlusion patterns. The study also introduces SVF, which reduces mean attack success to around 2.3%.

  2. 2021

    Self-supervised point-cloud defense

    At NeurIPS 2021, he and his coauthors show that self-supervised learning improves robustness for adversarial 3D point-cloud recognition.

  3. 2022

    Attacks on trajectory prediction

    In 2022, he coauthors a CVPR study of adversarial attacks on vehicle-trajectory prediction; tests on three models and datasets raise prediction error by more than 150%.

  4. June 2023

    CALICO for BEV perception

    In 2023, he coauthors CALICO, a self-supervised framework that applies contrastive objectives to LiDAR and camera backbones for bird's-eye-view perception.

  5. 2023

    A PhD and TikTok research

    He completes a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan in 2023, advised by Z. Morley Mao, and starts work at TikTok. His education includes an information-engineering B.S.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and study at the University of Washington.

  6. 2023–2024

    Dolphins for driving

    In 2023, he coauthors Dolphins, a conversational vision-language model for driving that processes video or image inputs, text instructions, and historical control signals. The paper is accepted to ECCV 2024 in July 2024.

  7. 2025

    Cocoon at ICLR

    At ICLR 2025, he coauthors Cocoon, an uncertainty-aware fusion framework for multimodal 3D object detection.

  8. Since December 2024

    Senior scientist at LinkedIn

    Since December 2024, he is a senior machine learning scientist on LinkedIn's Core AI team, where he works on large language models and agentic reinforcement learning.

Career

  1. Since 2024LinkedInSenior machine learning scientist
  2. 2024–2025Beijing University of Technology
  3. From 2023ByteDance

Education

  1. 2023University of MichiganPh.D.
  2. Shanghai Jiao Tong UniversityB.S.E.
  3. University of Washington

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Towards Robust LiDAR-based Perception in Autonomous Driving: General Black-box Adversarial Sensor Attack and Countermeasures2020 · 161 citations
  2. EMP2021 · Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking · 139 citations
  3. Ghostbuster2018 · Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking · 88 citations
  4. Dolphins: Multimodal Language Model for Driving2024 · Lecture notes in computer science · 54 citationsWith Chaowei Xiao and Marco Pavone
  5. Adversarially Robust 3D Point Cloud Recognition Using Self-Supervisions2021 · 18 citationsWith Chaowei Xiao

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Jiachen Sun. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  2. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Microsoft. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  3. LinkedIn (1,377) and X (1,193) lead social platforms across 1,935 people shaping AIIncludes LinkedIn. We find social, code or video accounts for 1,935 of the 7,547 people shaping AI (26%), led by LinkedIn (1,377), X (1,193) and GitHub (557).
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Microsoft. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jiachen Sun yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Towards Robust LiDAR-based Perception in Autonomous Driving: General Black-box Adversarial Sensor Attack and Countermeasures usenix.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Adversarially Robust 3D Point Cloud Recognition Using Self-Supervisions papers.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. On Adversarial Robustness of Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2306.00349] CALICO: Self-Supervised Camera-LiDAR Contrastive Pre-training for BEV Perception arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Jiachen Sun - Personal Website jiachens.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [2312.00438] Dolphins: Multimodal Language Model for Driving arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Cocoon: Robust Multi-Modal Perception with Uncertainty-Aware Sensor Fusion proceedings.iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.