Zhengxin Zhang

Zhengxin Zhang

PhD Student in Computer Science at Cornell University

I am a second-year CS PhD student at Cornell advised by Prof. Claire Cardie. Previously, I was a research assistant at Carnegie Mellon University supervised by Prof. Zhihao Jia. I obtained my MS at Tsinghua University supervised by Prof. Yong Jiang. My research interests include data stream structure and algorithms design, programmable switches, machine learning, and large language models. I received my BS at the CS department of Xidian University, where I was supervised by Prof. Yuesheng Xu.

zz865@cornell.edu Gates Hall G23, Ithaca, NY Google Scholar

News

Apr 2026 Two papers accepted to ACL 2026 Findings: Better LLM Reasoning via Dual-play and GSM-Noise: Exploring and Enhancing Large Language Models' Reasoning under Noisy Inputs. See you in San Diego!
Nov 2025 We released Better LLM Reasoning via Dual-play, a novel framework that trains two nearly identical models adversarially, enabling them to co-evolve through iterative competition without any external supervision. Read the blog post →

Publications

Preprints

Towards More Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Evaluating RAG Under Adversarial Poisoning Attacks
Jinyan Su, Jin Peng Zhou, Zhengxin Zhang, Preslav Nakov, Claire Cardie
Graph-based Multi-Task Learning Framework for Model Generalization across Network Topologies
Jingyu Xiao, Qing Li, Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, and Yong Jiang

2026

Better LLM Reasoning via Dual-play
Zhengxin Zhang*, Chengyu Huang*, Aochong Oliver Li, Claire Cardie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
GSM-Noise: Exploring and Enhancing Large Language Models' Reasoning under Noisy Inputs
Zhengxin Zhang*, Chengyu Huang*, Xufu Liu, Dan Zhao, Jinyan Su, Claire Cardie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
HumanGuideNet: Adapter-Based Alignment of Deep Neural Networks with Human Similarity Judgments
Xufu Liu, Yifan Yang, Zhengxin Zhang
The IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Mar 2026
HAPO: Training Language Models to Reason Concisely via History-Aware Policy Optimization
Chengyu Huang*, Zhengxin Zhang*, Claire Cardie
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Jan 2026

2025

Learning-Enhanced High-Throughput Pattern Matching Based on Programmable Data Plane
Guanglin Duan*, Yucheng Huang*, Zhengxin Zhang*, Qing Li, Dan Zhao, and Yong Jiang
The 2025 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), July 2025

2024

Quantized Side Tuning: Fast and Efficient Tuning of Quantized Large Language Models Outstanding Paper Award
Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, and Zhihao Jia
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), August 2024. Oral presentation.
Specinfer: Accelerating Large Language Model Serving with Tree-Based Speculative Inference and Verification
Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Zhihao Zhang, Xinhao Cheng, Zeyu Wang, Zhengxin Zhang, Rae Ying Yee Wong, Alan Zhu, Lijie Yang, Xiaoxiang Shi, Chunan Shi, Zhuoming Chen, Daiyaan Arfeen, Reyna Abhyankar, Zhihao Jia
Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), July 2024
DNSGuard: In-network Defense against DNS Attacks
Guanglin Duan, Qing Li, Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, Guorui Xie, and Yong Jiang
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), July 2024
SeIoT: Smart Home Network Anomaly Detection via Knowledge Graph
Qing Li, Ruoyu Li, Yucheng Huang, Qingsong Zou, Dan Zhao, Zhengxin Zhang, and Yong Jiang
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), July 2024

2023

Metis: Understanding and Enhancing Regular Expressions in Network
Zhengxin Zhang*, Yucheng Huang*, Guanglin Duan*, Qing Li, Dan Zhao, Yong Jiang, Lianbo Ma, Xiao Xi, and Hengyang Xu
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), December 2023
Pontus: Finding Waves in Data Streams
Zhengxin Zhang, Qing Li, Guanglin Duan, Dan Zhao, Jingyu Xiao, Guorui Xie, and Yong Jiang
ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), June 2023

* denotes equal contribution

Education

2024 – Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Cornell University
2023 – 2024
Visiting Scholar in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
2021 – 2024
M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University
GPA 3.88 / 4.0
2017 – 2021
B.S. in Software Engineering, Xidian University
GPA 3.86 / 4.0 · Rank 2 / 110

Awards

Experience

Jun 2023 – Aug 2024
Research Assistant, Carnegie Mellon University
Supervised by Prof. Zhihao Jia · Machine learning and large language models
Sep 2022 – Aug 2023
Research Intern, Tencent, Shenzhen
XDP and eBPF algorithm design

Talks

Cornell NLP Seminar: Quantized Side Tuning · Sep 2024
Tencent: Regular Expressions in the Data Plane · Dec 2023

Academic Service

ICLR Reviewer 2025
AAAI Programme Committee 2025
NeurIPS Reviewer 2024, 2025
COLM Reviewer 2025