• Hi there! I'm Zhenyu

    I'm a Member of Technical Staff at xAI, working on Grok reasoning. I obtained my Ph.D. from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of UT Austin, advised by Prof. Atlas Wang. Previously, I had the opportunity to broaden my practical AI skills while collaborating with Prof. Beidi Chen and Dr. Yuandong Tian.

    My research focuses on making models that can self-improve, with specific interests in: (i) Reinforcement Learning, (ii) Long-Context Modeling and Generation, and (iii) Scalable and Efficient Training and Inference Approaches

    I was recognized as a CPAL Rising Star in 2026 and an ML and Systems Rising Star in 2025, and received the MLSys'25 Outstanding Paper Award (Honorable Mention), along with several travel and reviewer awards from prestigious conferences.

Education

Ph.D. in The University of Texas at Austin
Sep. 2022 - May. 2026
Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advised by Prof. Atlas Wang.

M.E. in University of Science and Technology of China
Sep 2019 - May 2022
M.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advised by Prof. Bin Li.

B.S. in University of Science and Technology of China
Sep 2015 - May 2019
B.S. in Applied Physics
Yan Ji-Ci Talent Program in Physics

Selected Publication

SEAL: Steerable Reasoning Calibration of Large Language Models for Free

Runjin Chen*, Zhenyu Zhang*, Junyuan Hong, Souvik Kundu, Zhangyang Wang (* Equal Contribution)

Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2025

[Paper] [Project] [Code] [Intel]

Italian Trulli

H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models

Zhenyu Zhang, Ying Sheng, Tianyi Zhou, Tianlong Chen, Lianmin Zheng, Ruisi Cai, Zhao Song, Yuandong Tian, Christopher Ré, Clark Barrett, Zhangyang Wang, Beidi Chen

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

[Paper] [Project] [Code] [Meta/llama-recipes] [Answer.AI] [Talk] [新智元]

Italian Trulli

Work Experience

  • Research on GenAI modeling for alpha prediction.
  • Work with Dr. Wujie Huang.
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  • Conduct research on enhancing context awareness of long-context LLMs.
  • Work with Dr. Zhewei Yao, Dr. Xiaoxia Wu.
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