Yixi Zhou

About Me

I am Yixi (Xander) Zhou, an incoming Ph.D. student in computer science at Hong Kong Baptist University (Sept 2026–2030, expected), advised by Renchi Yang. I am also a member of the LAGAS Group (HKBU Database Lab). I am completing my B.S. at ShanghaiTech University. I spent Jan–Aug 2025 on exchange at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since Nov 2025 I have been a remote research assistant at MBZUAI, working on financial AI under Preslav Nakov and Zhuohan Xie. I am also a research assistant with The University of Tokyo and Nikkei on financial LLM, supervised by Fan Zhang and Yu Chen. During my undergraduate studies I have also been a researcher at ShanghaiTech’s Financial Intelligence Laboratory, advised by Haipeng Zhang.

Research & Interests

Ph.D. research direction: data agent.

My work spans life trajectory classification (LLMs and graph fusion on Wikipedia-style data), financial AI and NLP, optimization, and predictive analytics. My research interests include machine learning, natural language processing, and financial technology—LLMs, graph fusion, fairness in credit scoring, and interpretable retrieval. I am particularly interested in algorithms and systems that handle complex, real-world data and contribute to AI applications in data management and analytics.

If you are interested in specific projects, see the CV (Experience and Projects sections). I am passionate about bridging the gap between theoretical research and practical applications, and I look forward to continuing my academic journey while contributing to meaningful technological innovations.

News

Jun 24, 2026	Life Trajectory Paper Accepted to ICSC 2026 as Oral
May 06, 2026	FinReporting Accepted to ACL 2026 Demo
Apr 06, 2026	FinCARDS Accepted to ACL 2026 Findings
Jan 16, 2026	Received HKBU Ph.D. Offer

Selected Publications

All Publications (Google Scholar)

ACL Demo

FinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure

Fan Zhang , Mingzi Song , Rania Elbadry , Yixi Zhou , and 18 more authors

In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), San Diego, California, United States, Jul 2026

ACL 2026: July 2–7, 2026.

Bib PDF Demo

@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-finreporting,
  title = {{F}in{R}eporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure},
  author = {Zhang, Fan and Song, Mingzi and Elbadry, Rania and Chen, Yankai and Wang, Shaobo and Zhou, Yixi and Zheng, Xunwen and He, Yueru and Dai, Yuyang and Georgiev, Georgi Nenkov and Gull, Ayesha and Safder, Muhammad Usman and Wu, Fan and Meng, Liyuan and Ji, Fengxian and Zhao, Junning and Peng, Xueqing and Huang, Jimin and Chen, YU and Liu, Xue and Nakov, Preslav and Xie, Zhuohan},
  editor = {Durrett, Greg and Jian, Ping},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)},
  month = jul,
  year = {2026},
  address = {San Diego, California, United States},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-demo.71/},
  pages = {728--735},
  isbn = {979-8-89176-392-0},
  note = {ACL 2026: July 2--7, 2026.},
}

ACL Findings

FinCARDS: Card-Based Analyst Reranking for Financial Document Question Answering

Yixi Zhou , Fan Zhang , YU Chen , and 3 more authors

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, San Diego, California, United States, Jul 2026

ACL 2026: July 2–7, 2026.

Bib PDF Website

@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2026-fincards,
  title = {{F}in{CARDS}: Card-Based Analyst Reranking for Financial Document Question Answering},
  author = {Zhou, Yixi and Zhang, Fan and Chen, YU and Zhang, Haipeng and Nakov, Preslav and Xie, Zhuohan},
  editor = {Liakata, Maria and Moreira, Viviane P. and Zhang, Jiajun and Jurgens, David},
  booktitle = {Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026},
  month = jul,
  year = {2026},
  address = {San Diego, California, United States},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1244/},
  pages = {24836--24852},
  isbn = {979-8-89176-395-1},
  note = {ACL 2026: July 2--7, 2026.},
}

ICSC Oral

Fine-grained Classification of A Million Life Trajectories from Wikipedia

Zhaoyang Liu , Xiaocong Du , Yixi Zhou , and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Computing (ICSC 2026), Oxford, UK, Sep 2026

ICSC 2026: September 2–4, 2026. Accepted as an oral presentation.

Bib Website

@inproceedings{liu2026finegrained,
  title = {Fine-grained Classification of {A} Million Life Trajectories from Wikipedia},
  author = {Liu, Zhaoyang and Du, Xiaocong and Zhou, Yixi and Shi, Ye and Zhang, Haipeng},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Computing (ICSC 2026)},
  location = {Oxford, UK},
  note = {ICSC 2026: September 2--4, 2026. Accepted as an oral presentation.},
  eprint = {2602.04503},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04503},
}