About me

  • I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Statistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My advisor is Prof. Xiaohui Chen.
  • I received my M.A. in Statistics from Columbia University. My advisors at Columbia were Prof. Bodhisattva Sen and Prof. Arian Maleki.
  • I am broadly interested in statistical machine learning and data science. My primary research interests are optimal transport and its applications in machine learning and statistics. I am also interested in quantum machine learning and Riemannian optimization.

Recent Works

  • P. Xu, C. Hou, X. Chen, R. Y. Zhang. (2025). Scalable Second-order Riemannian Optimization for \(K\)-means Clustering. arXiv:2509.21675.
  • B. Zhang, P. Xu, X. Chen, and Q. Zhuang. (2025). Holographic deep thermalization: theory and experimentation. Nature Communications 16, 6341. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-61546-y.
  • B. Zhang, P. Xu, X. Chen, and Q. Zhuang. (2024). Generative Quantum Machine Learning via Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models. Physical Review Letters, 132, 100602. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.100602.