Xianwei Zou

Engineering Hall 308 5200

Irvine, CA 92697

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, advised by Prof. Aparna Chandramowlishwaran. I am part of HPC Forge.

I work on foundational generative models for fluid dynamics, focusing on diffusion and flow-based models for learning complex physical systems. My broader interests lie in generative AI (GenAI), scientific machine learning (SciML), and AI for science (AI4Science), with the goal of building models that are robust, efficient, physically grounded, and scalable across regimes.

I received my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2024 and my B.E. in Telecommunication Engineering from Xidian University in 2021.

Outside the lab, I spend most of my time training. Like in ML, I’m drawn to sports with clear benchmarks, things you can measure, track, and improve. I do endurance sports (rowing 🚣‍♂️, cycling 🚴‍♂️, long hikes 🥾) alongside powerlifting 🏋️‍♂️, timing the long efforts and logging the weight on the bar. I enjoy long, boring Zone 2 sessions as much as heavy singles. Both teach patience, consistency, and respect for limits.

selected publications

NeurIPS

Bubbleformer: Forecasting Boiling with Transformers

Sheikh Md Shakeel Hassan, Xianwei Zou, Akash Dhruv, and 1 more author

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

Spotlight

Bib

@article{hassan2025bubbleformer,
  title = {Bubbleformer: Forecasting Boiling with Transformers},
  author = {Hassan, Sheikh Md Shakeel and Zou, Xianwei and Dhruv, Akash and Chandramowlishwaran, Aparna},
  journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year = {2025},
  note = {Spotlight},
}

INTERSPEECH

The Hidden Dance of Phonemes and Visage: Unveiling the Enigmatic Link between Phonemes and Facial Features

Liao Qu^*, Xianwei Zou^*, Xiang Li^*, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{qu2023hidden,
  title = {The Hidden Dance of Phonemes and Visage: Unveiling the Enigmatic Link between Phonemes and Facial Features},
  author = {Qu, Liao and Zou, Xianwei and Li, Xiang and Wen, Yandong and Singh, Rita and Raj, Bhiksha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH)},
  year = {2023},
}