Hey I'm Zach! I am a second-year CS PhD student at University of Chicago, advised by Ce Zhang.

My research interests are centered on large language models with a recent focus on agentic systems, test-time scaling, and interdisciplinary scientific applications.

I am Assistant Editor of the journal Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR) under the JMLR family. I also contributed to Codabench, which is one of the most commonly used open source competition platforms according to ML Contests.

Zach Xu

News

  • Nov2025Started research internship at Together AI
  • Jul2025Started research internship at Virtue AI
  • Sep2024Started PhD at UChicago

Selected Publications

  • When Does Divide and Conquer Work for LLM in Processing Long Context? A Noise Decomposition Framework
    Zhen Xu, Shang Zhu, Jue Wang, Junlin Wang, Ben Athiwaratkun, Chi Wang, James Zou, Ce Zhang
    ICLR 2026[PDF]
  • Codabench: Flexible, easy-to-use, and reproducible meta-benchmark platform
    Zhen Xu, Sergio Escalera, Adrien Pavão, Magali Richard, Wei-Wei Tu, Quanming Yao, Huan Zhao, Isabelle Guyon
    Patterns Cell Press 2022[PDF]
    One of the most commonly used competition platforms according to ML Contests [23,24,25]