Zixuan Zhang

Zixuan Zhang

Anthropic Research Fellow · AI Security · Agentic RL · Learning Theory

I'm a final-year Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech (ISyE), advised by Prof. Tuo Zhao, and a Research Fellow in the Anthropic Fellows Program. My research aims to make large-scale AI systems reliable and interpretable: quantitative threat models for AI safety and security, RL post-training for LLM agents from environment infrastructure to stable long-horizon training, and theory of diffusion models and deep networks.

Portrait of Zixuan Zhang

01Research

Exfiltration scaling lawDrag ↔
Pretraining short medium long
Safety & Security

Quantitative threat models

How much of a model can an attacker steal under an egress limit? Run 4k+ compress-then-retrain attacks on dense and MoE model ladders and fit scaling laws for the egress limit a lab needs.

Anthropic Fellows · paper in prep
Decoupled agentic RL
Rollouts busy –Sync · stages take turns
Agents & Environments

Environments for agents

Contributed to strands-env, open-source agent infra, and built MCP, user-simulation and terminal-coding environments on a sandbox service, enabling 3k+ concurrent rollouts.

02Experience

Anthropic Fellows ProgramResearch Fellow

Aug 2026 – now

Quantifying how well egress limits protect model weights from exfiltration.

Amazon Stores Foundational AI (Rufus)Applied Scientist Intern

Jan – Jul 2026

Led agent RL post-training for tool use and terminal coding on a 100B+ MoE base.

Microsoft ResearchResearch Scientist Intern

Jun 2024 – Jun 2025

Memory-efficient LLM optimization and structured MoE compression.

03Publications

Full list on Google Scholar

04Talks

  • 2025 A Minimalist Example of Edge-of-Stability and Progressive Sharpening INFORMS Applied Probability Society Conference, Atlanta Slides
  • 2025 Robust Reinforcement Learning from Corrupted Human Feedback International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT), Los Angeles Slides
  • 2024 Sample Complexity of Diffusion Models for Learning Distributions on Low Dimensional Manifolds INFORMS Annual Meeting, Seattle Slides

05Education

  • Georgia Institute of TechnologyPh.D. in Machine Learning · Advisor: Tuo Zhao
    2022 – now
  • University of Science and Technology of ChinaB.S. in Statistics
    2018 – 2022
Honors
  • 2025Alice and John Jarvis Paper Award, Georgia Tech
  • 2024NeurIPS Travel Grant
  • 2022Stewart Topper Fellowship, Georgia Tech
Teaching
  • Summer 2025Basic Statistical Methods (ISYE 3030)Instructor
  • Fall 2023Computational Data Analysis (CSE/ISYE 6740)Teaching Assistant
  • Summer 2023Probability with Applications (ISYE 2027)Teaching Assistant