Zixiang Xu(徐子翔)is an incoming PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), advised by Prof. Yue Zhao. His research interests include Agent Systems, Trustworthy AI, and AI for Science & Society.
Previously, he received his B.S. in Computer Science from Sichuan University, supervised by Prof. Qijun Zhao. He has conducted research at MIT CTL, MBZUAI, and the University of Notre Dame, supervised by Prof. Elenna R. Dugundji, Prof. Xiuying Chen, and Prof. Xiangliang Zhang, respectively. He was also a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia working on Vision-Language Models.
🔥 News
- 2025.09: 🎉🎉 DyFlow and Adaptive Distraction have been accepted by NeurIPS 2025!. (Poster)
- 2025.09: 🎉🎉 SocialMaze has been accepted by SocialSim @ COLM 2025!. (Spotlight Talk)
- 2025.05: 🎉🎉 Cross-Lingual Pitfalls has been accepted by ACL 2025!.
- 2025.03: 🎉🎉 One paper has been accepted by SynthData @ ICLR 2025!. (Workshop)
- 2024.10: 🎉🎉 Temporal-IRL has been accepted by TRB 2024!. (Poster)
- 2024.07: 🎉🎉 GenUDC has been accepted by ACM MM 2024!. (Poster)
Every grand ambition starts with a humble beginning.
每一个远大的理想都有个微不足道的开始。
📝 Publications

Zixiang Xu*, Yanbo Wang*, Yue Huang*, Xiuying Chen, Jieyu Zhao, Meng Jiang, Xiangliang Zhang (*: Equal Contribution).

Adaptive Distraction: Probing LLM Contextual Robustness with Automated Tree Search
Yanbo Wang*, Zixiang Xu*, Yue Huang*, Chujie Gao, Siyuan Wu, Jiayi Ye, Xiuying Chen, Pin-Yu Chen, Xiangliang Zhang (*: Equal Contribution).

DyFlow: Dynamic Workflow Framework for Agentic Reasoning
Yanbo Wang, Zixiang Xu, Yue Huang, Xiangqi Wang, Zirui Song, Lang Gao, Chenxi Wang, Xiangru Tang, Yue Zhao, Arman Cohan, Xiangliang Zhang, Xiuying Chen

GTA: Graph Theory Agent and Benchmark for Algorithmic Graph Reasoning with LLMs
Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Chenxi Wang, Lang Gao, Zirui Song, Yue Huang, Zhaorun Chen, Xiangliang Zhang, Xiuying Chen

SocialMaze: A Benchmark for Evaluating Social Reasoning in Large Language Models
Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Yue Huang, Jiayi Ye, Haomin Zhuang, Zirui Song, Lang Gao, Chenxi Wang, Zhaorun Chen, Yujun Zhou, Sixian Li, Wang Pan, Yue Zhao, Jieyu Zhao, Xiangliang Zhang, Xiuying Chen

Temporal-IRL: Modeling Port Congestion and Berth Scheduling with Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Yikuan Hu*, Zixiang Xu*, Wei Zhang*, Xinyu Yang*, Guo Li*, Nikolay Aristov, Mingjie Tang, Elenna R Dugundji(*: Equal contribution)

GenUDC: High Quality 3D Mesh Generation With Unsigned Dual Contouring Representation
Ruowei Wang, Jiaqi Li, Dan Zeng, Xueqi Ma, Xu Zixiang, Jianwei Zhang, Qijun Zhao
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MTFusion: Reconstructing Any 3D Object from Single Image Using Multi-word Textual Inversion, Yu Liu, Ruowei Wang, Jiaqi Li, Zixiang Xu, Qijun Zhao. PRCV 2024 (oral).
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Text-Based Face Retrieval: Methods and Challenges, Yuchuan Deng, Qijun Zhao, Zhanpeng Hu, Zixiang Xu. CCBR 2023(Oral).
🎖 Honors and Awards
Major Awards
- CCF Elite Collegiate Award (2024)
- Gold Medal, ACM-ICPC Asia Jinan Regional Contest (2022)
- Silver Medal, National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) (2020)
Other Honors
- Bronze Medal, ACM-ICPC Asia-East Continent Final Contest (2022)
- First Prize, National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces (NOIP) (2021) - 6th Place in Hubei Province
- First Prize, CSP-S (2021) - 2nd Place in Hubei Province
💻 Internships
- 2025.03 - 2025.09, Research Intern, MBZUAI, supervised by Prof. Xiuying Chen.
- 2024.09 - 2025.08, Visiting Researcher (Remote), University of Notre Dame, supervised by Prof. Xiangliang Zhang.
- 2024.07 - 2024.08, Research Intern, MIT CTL, supervised by Prof. Elenna R. Dugundji.
- 2024.02 - 2024.03, Research Intern, Microsoft Research Asia.
🔍 Service
Reviewer: ACL EMNLP ARR NLPCC
🎭 Miscellaneous
Beyond research and competitive programming, he is a passionate enthusiast of films, games, and visual novels. He is especially fond of the works of Tanaka Romeo (田中ロミオ), particularly CROSS†CHANNEL and Rewrite.
- 蓝宝石般的被害妄想少女
- 辯護人
- 大明王朝1566
- Yes, Minister
- Yes, Prime Minister
- Fire Punch
- さよなら絵梨
- Look Back
- 逆境無頼カイジ
- 銀と金
- 家族計画
- 終のステラ
- 加奈 〜いもうと〜
- サクラノ詩
- 素晴らしき日々~不連続存在~
- AIR
- Angel Beats!
- CLANNAD
- Summer Pockets
- Planetarian
- Kanon
- Ever17
- WHITE ALBUM2
- STEINS;GATE
- Danganronpa 2
- キラ☆キラ
- 潜伏之赤途
- 魔法使いの夜
- narcissu
- うみねこのなく頃に
- ひぐらしのなく頃に
- Slay the Spire
- Balatro
- 乙女理論とその周辺
- ISLAND
- 鋼の錬金術師
- 進撃の巨人
- 葬送のフリーレン