Xiaoyuan Zhu

Hi, I’m Xiaoyuan ; ) I’m a 4th-year undergrad at USC , double majoring in computer science and applied math. I’m fortunate to be advised by Prof. Willie Neiswanger, Prof. Robin Jia, and Prof. Xuezhe Ma. I had wonderful time interning at USC Interaction Lab (summer 2023), CAIS (winter 2023), and with Prof. Steven Wu at CMU S3D (summer 2025) .

My research mainly focuses on developing efficient and effective training-time and inference-time methods to improve model safety and usability . Some broad questions I’m recently interested in :

• can we identify what can be learned from user feedback, and how to enable models to learn continuously after deployment ?

• How to improve the sampling and computational efficiency of rollouts in RL, especially in settings with sparser reward ?

Alongside my research, I co-lead USC’s AI Safety Club, a student group promoting safety in advanced AI systems. We run semester-long programs on introductory and technical topics . I’ve also explored computational neuroscience 🧠 .

I’m applying to Ph.D. programs for Fall 2026 ! ✨