Fred Zhang

z0@berkeley.edu

I am a research scientist at Google DeepMind.

I completed my Ph.D. at Berkeley EECS in 2024, advised by Jelani Nelson. During graduate school, I had also spent time at Simons Institute, Google Research and Berkeley AI Research. I received B.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics from Duke University, where I had the fortune of working with Rong Ge and Debmalya Panigrahi.

Links: Google Scholar / Twitter

Publications show selected / by date / by topic

Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models

Danny Halawi, Fred Zhang, Chen Yueh-Han, Jacob Steinhardt ( Equal contribution).

NeurIPS 2024 (arXiv, Twitter thread, blogpost, code)

Towards Best Practices of Activation Patching in Language Models: Metrics and Methods

Fred Zhang, Neel Nanda (contribution order).

ICLR 2024 (arXiv, Twitter thread)

Privately Estimating a Gaussian: Efficient, Robust and Optimal

Daniel Alabi, Pravesh K. Kothari, Pranay Tankala, Prayaag Venkat, Fred Zhang (alphabetical order).

STOC 2023 (arXiv)

Online Prediction in Sub-linear Space

Binghui Peng, Fred Zhang (alphabetical order).

SODA 2023 Best Student Paper (arXiv, talk at Google, talk at TTIC)

Robust and Heavy-Tailed Mean Estimation Made Simple, via Regret Minimization

Samuel B. Hopkins, Jerry Li, Fred Zhang (alphabetical order).

NeurIPS 2020 (arXiv)

A Fast Spectral Algorithm for Mean Estimation with Sub-Gaussian Rates

Zhixian Lei, Kyle Luh, Prayaag Venkat, Fred Zhang (alphabetical order).

COLT 2020 (arXiv)

Notes

Leverage Score and Feature Dimensionality (comment on Toy Models of Superposition, 2023)
Mirror Descent and Online Learning (lecture note, 2019)
Tensor Networks, Matrix Product States and Density Matrix Renormalization Group (blog post at Windows on Theory, 2018)
Goodness-of-fit Testing and Structure Learning of the Ising Model (survey, 2018)
The Topological Approach Towards Graph Evasiveness (survey, 2017)
Berkeley Food Opinions (2024)

Teaching

Graduate Student Instructor, UC Berkeley

CS 294-165: Sketching Algorithms (Fall 20)
CS 170: Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems (Spring 20)

Undergraudate Teaching Assistant, Duke University

COMPSCI 330: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Spring 16, Fall 16, Spring 17, Fall 17, Spring 18)

Contact

z0@berkeley.edu