Hi, I’m Zoe, a first-year Ph.D. student in the EECS department at MIT. I’m fortunate to be advised by Yael Tauman Kalai and Ryan Williams. Before this, I did my undergrad at MIT, and then I was very lucky to be advised by Bill Kuszmaul and Virginia Vassilevska Williams.

I’m interested in theoretical computer science broadly, and currently am excited about exploring connections between complexity theory and cryptography, and thinking about how we might apply ideas from these areas to study problems in AI safety.

You can reach me at zoexi at mit dot edu.

Publications

Liyan Chen, Yael Tauman Kalai, and Zoe Xi, How to Avoid Debate: Scalable AI Safety via Doubly-Efficient Interactive Proofs.
In ICML 2026.

Zoe Xi, Variants of Baranyai’s Theorem with Additional Conditions.
In Discrete Mathematics, 349 (2026).

Amir Abboud, Nick Fischer, Ce Jin, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, and Zoe Xi, All-Pairs Shortest Paths with Few Weights per Node.
In STOC 2025.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams, Zoe Xi, Yinzhan Xu, and Uri Zwick, All-Hops Shortest Paths.
In SODA 2025.

William Kuszmaul and Zoe Xi, Towards an Analysis of Quadratic Probing.
In ICALP 2024.

Zoe Xi and William Kuszmaul, Approximating Dynamic Time Warping Distance Between Run-Length Encoded Strings.
In ESA 2022.
Best Student Paper. Invited as a Highlight Presentation at CPM 2023.

Preprints

Liyan Chen, Matthew M. Hong, Yael Tauman Kalai, and Zoe Xi, Towards a Doubly Efficient IP = PSPACE.

Nathan S. Sheffield, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, and Zoe Xi, The Limits of Black-Box Reductions for All-Pairs Triangle Detection.

Nathan S. Sheffield and Zoe Xi, Graphs With the Same Edge Count in Each Neighborhood.