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 ShanghaiTech’s 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

  1. Event-Type Propagation Graphs: A Lag-Aware Layer for Predictive Financial Analysis
    Yuxuan Li , Bohan Zhang , Guo Yu , Yixi Zhou , and 2 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Shenyang, China, Nov 2026
    ICDM 2026: November 12–15, 2026. Accepted to the Applied Track.
  2. EMNLP Industry
    PRISM: Prompt-Refined In-Context System Modeling for Financial Retrieval
    Chun Chet Ng , Jia Yu Lim , Zhen Hao Chu , Yixi Zhou , and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, Budapest, Hungary, Oct 2026
    EMNLP 2026: October 24–29, 2026. Accepted to the Industry Track.
  3. EMNLP Findings
    TimeClaimBench: A Claim-Level Benchmark for Grounded LLM Explanations of Time Series
    Sijia Peng , Fan Zhang , Yixi Zhou , and 6 more authors
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, Budapest, Hungary, Oct 2026
    EMNLP 2026: October 24–29, 2026. Accepted to Findings.
  4. ACL Demo
    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.
  5. AACL Findings
    Yixi Zhou , Fan Zhang , Zhiqiao Guo , and 4 more authors
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: AACL-IJCNLP 2026, Hengqin, China, Nov 2026
    AACL-IJCNLP 2026: November 6–10, 2026. Accepted to Findings.
  6. ACL Findings
    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.
  7. 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.