Zhen Xiong
Ph.D. student, Computer Science · New York University
I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at New York University. My research interests include LLMs, agentic AI systems, and recursive self-improvement.
Before NYU, I got my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where I worked on the interpretability, controllability, and applications of large language models.
Publications
* equal contributionUnveiling the Potential of Diffusion Large Language Model in Controllable Generation
Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang
Mapping the Minds of LLMs: A Graph-Based Analysis of Reasoning LLM
Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang
Enhancing Image Generation Fidelity via Progressive Prompts
Zhen Xiong, Yuqi Li, Chuanguang Yang, Tiao Tan, Zhihong Zhu, Siyuan Li, Yue Ma
ICASSP 2025pdf
GraphNarrator: Generating Textual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
Bo Pan*, Zhen Xiong*, Guanchen Wu*, Zheng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao
ACL 2025pdf
Texture or Semantics? Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Font Recognition
Zhecheng Li, Guoxian Song, Yujun Cai, Zhen Xiong, Junsong Yuan, Yiwei Wang
COLM 2025pdf
Vulnerability of LLMs to Vertically Aligned Text Manipulations
Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang, Bryan Hooi, Yujun Cai, Zhen Xiong, Nanyun Peng, Kai-wei Chang
ACL 2025pdf
WaveGNN: Integrating Graph Neural Networks and Transformers for Decay-Aware Classification of Irregular Clinical Time-Series
Arash Hajisafi, Maria Despoina Siampou, Bita Azarijoo, Zhen Xiong, Cyrus Shahabi
IEEE BigData 2025★ Best Student Paper Runner-uppdf
Preprints
TrajTok: Adaptive Spatial Tokenization for Trajectory Representation Learning
Zhen Xiong, Shang-Ling Hsu, Cyrus Shahabi
arXiv 2026pdf
TRACE: Trajectory Selection for Parallel Scaling of Search Agents
Qisheng Zhou, Zhen Xiong, Qiaoyu Tan
arXiv 2026pdf
AsynCodeBench: Benchmarking Collaboration of Asynchronous Multi-Agent Systems in Software Engineering
Kaituo Zhang, Zhen Xiong, Zhimeng Jiang, Mingyu Zhong, Zhouyuan Yuan, Zhecheng Li, Bowen Lin, Chia-Yuan Chang, Mingzhi Hu, Huazheng Wang, Ying Lin
arXiv 2026pdf
Are Tools All We Need? Unveiling the Tool-Use Tax in LLM Agents
Kaituo Zhang, Zhen Xiong, Mingyu Zhong, Zhimeng Jiang, Zhouyuan Yuan, Zhecheng Li, Ying Lin
arXiv 2026pdf
A Survey on Evaluating Quality and Trustworthiness in LLM-Generated Data
Kaituo Zhang, Mingzhi Hu, Hoang Anh Duy Le, Fariha Kabir Torsha, Zhimeng Jiang, Minh Khai Bui, Chia-Yuan Chang, Yu-Neng Chuang, Zhen Xiong, Ying Lin, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou
arXiv 2026pdf
Thinking with Sound: Audio Chain-of-Thought Enables Multimodal Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models
Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Zhecheng Li, Junsong Yuan, Yiwei Wang
Education
New York University
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Southern California
M.S. in Computer Science · GPA: 3.92 / 4.00
University of California, Irvine
Joint Undergraduate Education Program · GPA: 4.00 / 4.00
Beijing University of Chemical Technology
B.Eng. in Computer Science · GPA: 93.86 / 100 (Ranked #1 / 161)
Honors
Best Student Paper Runner-up Award, IEEE BigData
Renmin Scholarship, Top University Scholarship
University Outstanding Academic Achievement Award
1st Prize, Mathematics Competition of Chinese College Students
1st Prize, University Competitive Programming Contest
2nd Prize, Beijing College Student Mathematical Modeling Competition
National Scholarship
Service
reviewerNeurIPS · ICLR · EMNLP · CIKM
Neurocomputing · Pattern Recognition