Hi, I’m Xijia Polina Zhang, a second year Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology. My research interest broadly includes foundation model reasoning and interpretability. I’m currently investigating how latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can enhance vision-language-action (VLA) models, and whether embodied reasoning traces can be meaningfully interfered, interpreted, or aligned.

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 .