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Alan Zhu
CS PhD Student, University of California, Berkeley

I am a second-year CS PhD student at UC Berkeley advised by Prof. Joseph Gonzalez. My research interests are in AI agents generally, with a recent focus on social agents in competitive settings and agents trusted to act on behalf of human users. I am supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Previously, I graduated with a BS from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where I majored in Computer Science with an additional major in Mathematical Statistics. At CMU, I worked in the Catalyst Lab under the supervision of Prof. Zhihao Jia and in the Interactive Structures Lab under the supervision of Prof. Alexandra Ion. I have also worked on research under the supervision of Prof. Qiaozhu Mei at the University of Michigan.

Publications and Preprints

Cooperate to Compete: Strategic Coordination in Multi-Agent Conquest, 2026, ICML Trustworthy AI for Good Workshop
Abigail O'Neill* , Alan Zhu* , Mihran Miroyan* , Narges Norouzi , Joseph E. Gonzalez
arxiv
Recon: Reconstruction-Guided Reasoning Synthesis for User Modeling, 2026
Alan Zhu* , Mihran Miroyan* , Carolyn Wang , Andrew Zhou , Lisa Dunlap , Narges Norouzi , Joseph E. Gonzalez
arxiv
How to Train Your Advisor: Steering Black-Box LLMs with Advisor Models, 2026, ICML
Parth Asawa* , Alan Zhu* , Abby O'Neill , Matei Zaharia , Alexandros G. Dimakis , Joseph E. Gonzalez
arxiv
Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First, 2026, CIDR
Shu Liu* , Soujanya Ponnapalli* , Shreya Shankar* , Sepanta Zeigham* , Alan Zhu* , Shubham Agarwal , Ruiqi Chen , Samion Suwito , Shuo Yuan , Ion Stoica , Matei Zaharia , Alvin Cheung , Natacha Crooks , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Aditya G. Parameswaran
arxiv
SkyRL-SQL: Multi-turn SQL Data Agents via RL, 2025, NeurIPS MTI-LLM Workshop
Shu Liu* , Alan Zhu* , Sumanth Hegde , Shiyi Cao , Shuo Yuan , Samion Suwito , Tyler Griggs , Matei Zaharia , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ion Stoica
openreview
BARE: Combining Base and Instruction-Tuned Language Models for Better Synthetic Data Generation, 2025, ICML DataWorld Workshop Oral
Alan Zhu* , Parth Asawa* , Jared Quincy Davis , Lingjiao Chen , Boris Hanin , Ion Stoica , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Matei Zaharia
arxiv
Efficient Estimation of Shortest-Path Distance Distributions to Samples in Graphs, 2025
Alan Zhu , Jiaqi Ma , Qiaozhu Mei
arxiv
Accelerating Retrieval-augmented Language Model Serving with Speculation, 2024, ICML
Zhihao Zhang , Alan Zhu , Lijie Yang , Yihua Xu , Lanting Li , Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana , Zhihao Jia
arxiv
SpecInfer: Accelerating Generative Large Language Model Serving with Speculative Inference and Token Tree Verification, 2024, ASPLOS
Xupeng Miao* , Gabriele Oliaro* , Zhihao Zhang* , Xinhao Cheng* , Zeyu Wang , Rae Ying Yee Wong , Alan Zhu , Lijie Yang , Xiaoxiang Shi , Chunan Shi , Zhuoming Chen , Daiyaan Arfeen , Reyna Abhyankar , Zhihao Jia
arxiv
Robotic Metamaterials, 2024, CHI
Zhitong Cui , Shuhong Wang , Violet Yinuo Han , Tucker Rae-Grant , Willa Yunqi Yang , Alan Zhu , Scott E Hudson , Alexandra Ion
acm

Teaching

TA for 15-251 Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Head TA: Fall 2023 - Spring 2024
Associate Head TA: Spring 2023
TA: Fall 2021 - Fall 2022
public course website (spring 23)

Miscellaneous

In high school (at Greenhills School) I was active in math and robotics competitions. I qualified for the USAJMO in 2016 and the USAMO in 2019. I also served as programming team lead for the robotics team (FRC Team #5530 - The Greenhills Lawnmowers), which qualified for the FIRST World Championships in 2019.