About Me
I am Yixi (Xander) Zhou, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Hong Kong Baptist University since September 2026, advised by Prof. Renchi Yang. I am also a member of the LAGAS Group, affiliated with the Database Research Group at HKBU. I received my B.S. in Computer Science and Technology from ShanghaiTech University in June 2026, and 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 Prof. 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 Prof. Yu Chen. In July-August 2026, I am serving as a research assistant at ShanghaiTechβs Financial Intelligence Laboratory, advised by Prof. Haipeng Zhang.
Research & Interests
Ph.D. research direction: data agents and LLM-based systems for complex data.
My research centers on data agents and reliable LLM-based systems that can reason over complex, real-world data. I am particularly interested in combining retrieval, structured reasoning, and trustworthy evaluation to build practical AI systems for data management and analytics.
My recent work spans financial information retrieval and document QA, grounded LLM explanations of time series, event propagation for predictive financial analysis, structural evaluation of Text-to-SQL generation, and large-scale life trajectory classification. More broadly, I am interested in natural language processing, data mining, graph-based learning, and interpretable AI.
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
| Sep 08, 2026 | π SQLStructEval Accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026 Findings |
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| Aug 21, 2026 | π TimeClaimBench Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Findings |
| Aug 21, 2026 | π PRISM Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Industry Track |
| Aug 17, 2026 | π Event-Type Propagation Graphs Accepted to IEEE ICDM 2026 |
| Jul 07, 2026 | βοΈ Attended ACL 2026 |
- EMNLP Industry
- EMNLP FindingsTimeClaimBench: A Claim-Level Benchmark for Grounded LLM Explanations of Time SeriesIn Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, Budapest, Hungary, Oct 2026EMNLP 2026: October 24β29, 2026. Accepted to Findings.
- ACL DemoFinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial DisclosureIn Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), San Diego, California, United States, Jul 2026ACL 2026: July 2β7, 2026.
- AACL FindingsIn Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2026, Hengqin, China, Nov 2026AACL-IJCNLP 2026: November 6β10, 2026. Accepted to Findings.
- ACL FindingsIn Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, San Diego, California, United States, Jul 2026ACL 2026: July 2β7, 2026.
- In Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Computing (ICSC 2026), Oxford, UK, Sep 2026ICSC 2026: September 2β4, 2026. Accepted as an oral presentation.