About
I am an incoming Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student at Johns Hopkins University, where I'm advised by Prof. Laixi Shi. I completed my undergraduate degree in Automation at Zhejiang University in 2025. During my undergraduate years, I was a visiting student researcher at Berkeley AI Research (BAIR), UC Berkeley, working with Prof. Gopala Anumanchipalli.
Email: xuanruzhou15 at gmail.com | xzhou155 at jhu.edu
Research Overview
I'm interested in the following areas from different perspectives:
- Machine intelligence
- Multimodal perception and reasoning
- Agentic RL - long-horizon reasoning, planning, tool use, and multi-agent orchestration
- World models, autonomous decision-making
- Causality, first-principles thinking
- Neuro-symbolic AI
- Alignment and universal representation learning
- Computational cognitive science
- Human-like concept learning and abstract reasoning
- Theory of mind and social cognition in agents
- Sample-efficient learning, compositional generalization
Selected Papers
(* indicates equal contribution). Full list available on Google Scholar.
Selected Awards
- 2025 Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate of Zhejiang University
- 2025 Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award
- 2024 NeurIPS Scholar Award
- 2024 ISCA Student Travel Award
- 2022 Zhejiang Provincial Government Scholarship
Trivia
My favorite artist is Lady Gaga, go support her new album MAYHEM! I'm also a fan of Kpop music.
Before I went to middle school, I was a member of the city swimming team.
I enjoy playing with dogs and cats.