My research lies at the intersection of World Models, Agentic Reinforcement Learning, and Multimodal Large Language Models. I aim to build multimodal agents that go beyond perceiving the world—agents that can imagine it. Concretely, I study how to teach MLLMs to invoke world models as internal simulators, mentally rolling out future states before committing to an answer or an action, and how to train this imagination capability through reinforcement learning so the agent learns when to imagine, how deeply to imagine, and how to trust what it imagines. My long-term vision is to make imagination a first-class citizen of multimodal reasoning, enabling agents that are not only more capable, but also faithful, grounded, and compute-efficient—reliable enough to be trusted in long-horizon, real-world decision making under limited compute.

Here are some of my research works.

• Journals: ACM TIST, IEEE TCSS
• Conferences: ACL Rolling Review, ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, ICLR

I genuinely believe that meaningful progress in academia stems from open dialogue and thoughtful debate. If you have any questions about my research–or if you’ve previously contacted me through GitHub issues and haven’t received a response–please feel free to reach out via email. I’m always happy to chat, collaborate, or offer assistance where I can.

Throughout my academic journey, I’ve been fortunate to receive support and inspiration from many generous people. I’m always eager to give back to the community and engage with others passionate about learning and discovery.

That said, I’m not interested in discussions centered around citation counts, publication metrics, or quantitative comparisons between individuals. If your outreach is primarily motivated by such metrics, I kindly ask that you refrain from contacting me. I’m most interested in conversations about meaningful problems, creative solutions, and insightful ideas.

Preferred Email:

• EnjunDu.cs@gmail.com

Optional Email:

• edu719@connect.hkust-gz.edu.cn, enjundu@tencent.com

Please avoid contacting me at enjun_du@bit.edu.cn, as I will no longer have access to this address.