Hi, I’m Xijia Polina Zhang, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology advised by Professor Matthew Gombolay. I’m interested in how reasoning capabilities emerge and evolve in large-scale foundation models, and whether we could meaningfully interfere with, interpret and align them. I’m also actively involved in work on explainable AI, human robot interaction, and reinforcement learning.

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 .