Hi, I’m Xijia Polina Zhang, a Robotics Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology advised by Prof. Zsolt Kira . My research seeks to understand and explain why foundation models work. Ultimately, I aim to reverse-engineer them to be steerable, grounded, and transparent, and to bridge their latent representations with human-level semantics through language. I always welcome all kinds of collaborations that make sense, please don’t hesitate to reach out !

I publish under the name Zhang Xi-Jia, similar to the convention followed by Li Fei-Fei . In many Asian cultures, surnames are common and not reliable as personal identifiers. My surname Zhang, for example, is shared by over 100 million people worldwide.

Download my resumé . View my papers .