詹锟 | Kun Zhan
Head of Foundation Model Team at Li Auto
Email: zk_1028@aliyun.com
WeChat: KevinZhan1990
Beijing, China
Building embodied intelligence from autonomous driving to robotics
I lead Li Auto's MindVLA and MindGPT teams, spanning behavior intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and production-grade deployment across autonomous driving, smart cabin, and future embodied systems.
About Me
I'm Kun Zhan, leading Li Auto's MindVLA and MindGPT teams while also serving as Site Manager for the company's Silicon Valley R&D center. My work spans behavior intelligence and cognitive intelligence, building foundation models for autonomous-driving VLA, smart-cabin LLM/VLM, and speech systems, then pushing them into production with automotive-grade reliability.
My journey began with a master's degree in Automation from Beihang University, followed by leading Baidu Apollo's behavior prediction team. Since joining Li Auto in 2021, I have been responsible for architecting and deploying three generations of autonomous-driving stacks, evolving toward a unified framework that connects perception, reasoning, planning, and action, and scales from driving to broader embodied systems.
My mission is to realize embodied, physical-world AGI using autonomous driving as the starting point and expanding toward robotics and wider real-world intelligence.
Key Highlights
Leadership, production execution, and research translation at scale.
Scaled leadership
Lead Li Auto's Foundation Model organization across VLA, VLM, LLM, and World Models, covering research, training infrastructure, deployment, and on-vehicle integration.
Production impact
Delivered Highway NoA (2022), City NoA (2023), End-to-End + VLM dual-system (2024), and the new VLA stack (2025) to mass-produced Li Auto vehicles.
Global execution
Built Li Auto's U.S. research hub and aligned Silicon Valley exploration with Beijing headquarters execution.
Research Interests
The current themes that define my research and engineering agenda.
Work Experience
Programs and roles that shaped my approach to applied AI systems.
Li Auto
Apr 2021 - Present
- Lead the R&D of VLA foundation models and coordinate integration with self-developed autonomous-driving chips.
- Built Li Auto's autonomous stack from E2E to VLM to VLA architectures operating on hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
- Mentor a 100+ member organization across perception, planning, foundation models, simulation, and deployment.
- Established dedicated world-model and RL groups to accelerate closed-loop learning and reduce real-world testing cost.
- Launched Li Auto's overseas research hub, covering local strategy, budgeting, and talent acquisition.
- Bridge Silicon Valley innovation with Beijing execution through cross-border program reviews and roadmap alignment.
Baidu Apollo
Apr 2016 - Mar 2021
- Led the L4 prediction pre-decision algorithms for robo-taxi pilots, improving motion forecasting in complex urban scenes.
- Shipped planning-and-control modules and deep-learning onboard components for autonomous fleets in Beijing and Guangzhou.
学术成果
基于 Google Scholar 的论文与引用快照
Top 10 引用论文
按 Google Scholar 引用量排序，更新时间见卡片上方。
Patents & Service
Research service and technology transfer beyond the production stack.
Patents
20 granted or issued patents: 18 CN and 2 US across perception, planning, and HD mapping pipelines.
Reviewer
CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, AAAI, IROS, and journals including TPAMI, T-ITS, and T-IV.
Community
Organizer of the CVPR 2023 Autonomous Driving Workshop and frequent speaker on VLA deployment in production.