Cyrus Zikai Zhou
PhD Student in Computer Science, Stanford University
About
I am a Computer Science PhD student at Stanford University, advised by the amazing Prof. Monica S. Lam. I am affiliated with the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab and the Stanford NLP Group. My research combines formal methods with large language models to tackle domains with complex structure, such as healthcare and biomedicine. I build end-to-end systems that are deployed in real-world settings, with a focus on reliability and precision. Ultimately, I hope this line of work improves the logical and scientific reasoning capabilities of foundation models. Previously, I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago.
I'm actively looking for collaborators and research assistants to work on AI + formal methods, AI + healthcare, and AI research systems. Feel free to reach out if you're interested!
Selected Publications
- Accountable AI with Grounded, Faithful, Consistent, Actionable Rationales: A Case Study in Clinical Trial Matching with VERDICT EMNLP Main, 2026
- SatIR: Scalable High-Recall Constraint-Satisfaction-Based Information Retrieval for Clinical Trials Matching COLM, 2026
- LowRA: Accurate and Efficient LoRA Fine-Tuning of LLMs under 2 Bits ICML, 2025
- If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try, Again...? Insights and LLM-informed Tooling for Detecting Retry Bugs in Software Systems SOSP, 2024
- Helping Users Debug Trigger-Action Programs UbiComp, 2023
Awards
- Enlight Foundation Graduate Fellowship ($90K), Stanford University, 2024
- CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, Honorable Mention, 2023
- UChicago Quad Undergraduate Research Scholars (×3), 2022–2024
- Valedictorian, Ningbo Xiaoshi High School, 2020
- John Locke Institute Essay Competition, Psychology Prize Winner, 2019
Services
- UChicago Student Summer CS Research Fellowship Program, Student Lead, Summer 2023
- Kinzon Capital, Assistant to the General Partner, Summer 2021
- CreditEase GenZ Forum, Co-organizer, Mar – Sep 2021
Experience
Early in my PhD, I got startup experience by interning at an AI infrastructure startup (2025) building memory processing technology for AI systems, where I worked on next-generation AI chip pathfinding and LLM inference cost modeling. Earlier, I worked at Moody's (2022) building data-management tooling, and at Vision Knight Capital (2021) on investment research.
Mentees & Collaborators
I've had the privilege to work with amazing students: