I’m a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), where I am advised by Prof. Ramesh Govindan and Prof. Z. Morley Mao in the Networked Systems Lab (NSL). I also work closely with Prof. Qingzhao Zhang. Previously, I received my Master of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where I worked as a Research Assistant advised by Prof. Xinyu Zhang. Before UCSD, I earned a joint bachelor’s degree with honors in Communication Engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and the University of Glasgow (UofG).

My research interests primarily lie in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and world models for embodied AI (e.g., autonomous driving and robotics), especially their robustness and security. Before that, I worked on mobile networking and wireless sensing.

🔥 News

• 2026.10: I will go to MobiCom 2026 in Austin, TX! See you there!
• 2026.9: Our paper “Say the Same, Act Differently: Diagnosing and Steering Text–Action Divergence in Reasoning VLAs” has been accepted by NeurIPS 2026! Camera-ready coming soon.
• 2026.5: I will join General Motors Research & Development as a research intern in Summer 2026!
• 2025.12: Our paper From Bits to Tokens: Knowledge-Driven Generative Communication of Multimodal Data has been accepted by NSDI 2026! Congrats to Xingyu!
• 2025.11: Our paper MANA: Towards Efficient Mobile Ad Detection via Multimodal Agentic UI Navigation has been accepted by MobiCom 2026! Congrats to Yizhe!
• 2025.8: I’m excited to share that I started my PhD journey at USC!
• 2025.5: I will be joining Prof. Ju Ren’s Group at Tsinghua University as a visiting student.
• 2025.3: Excited to announce I’ll be joining the Networked Systems Lab (NSL) in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC) as a PhD student starting August 2025!
• 2025.2: Our paper Radio Frequency Ray Tracing with Neural Object Representation has been accepted by CVPR 2025! Congrats to Xingyu!
• 2024.11: I will be presenting my workshop paper at ACM MobiCom 2024 in Washington, D.C. See you there!
• 2024.9: Our paper RFCanvas: Modeling RF Channel by Fusing Visual Priors and Few-shot RF measurements has been accepted by SenSys 2024! Congrats to Xingyu!
• 2024.8: Our paper Hybrid Data-Driven and Simulation-Driven Prediction of mmWave Network Performance has been accepted by MobiCom Workshop 2024 @ PICASSO!

📝 Publications

• Say the Same, Act Differently: Diagnosing and Steering Text–Action Divergence in Reasoning VLAs NeurIPS Page
  • Zihao Feng, Qingzhao Zhang, Chunyu Xia, Bo Yu, Z. Morley Mao, Ramesh Govindan
  • NeurIPS 2026 (camera-ready version coming soon)
• From Bits to Tokens: Knowledge-Driven Generative Communication of Multimodal Data Paper
  • Xingyu Chen, Zihao Feng, Wuqiong Zhao, Jianrong Ding, Ke Sun, Xinyu Zhang
  • NSDI 2026
• MANA: Towards Efficient Mobile Ad Detection via Multimodal Agentic UI Navigation Paper
  • Yizhe Zhao, Yongjian Fu, Zihao Feng, Hao Pan, Yongheng Deng, Yaoxue Zhang, Ju Ren
  • MobiCom 2026
• Radio Frequency Ray Tracing with Neural Object Representation Paper
  • Xingyu Chen, Zihao Feng, Kun Qian, Xinyu Zhang
  • CVPR 2025
• RFCanvas: Modeling RF Channel by Fusing Visual Priors and Few-shot RF measurements Paper
  • Xingyu Chen, Zihao Feng, Ke Sun, Kun Qian, Xinyu Zhang
  • SenSys 2024
• Hybrid Data-Driven and Simulation-Driven Prediction of mmWave Network Performance Paper
  • Zihao Feng, Xingyu Chen, Xuyang Cao, Xinyu Zhang
  • MobiCom Workshop 2024

🎓 Education

• 2025.8 – Present, University of Southern California (USC)
  • PhD in Computer Science
• 2023.9 – 2025.3, University of California San Diego (UCSD)
  • MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering
    
• 2019.9 – 2023.6, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)
  • BEng in Communication Engineering, GPA: 3.87/4.0, Rank: Top 5%
  • BEng in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Glasgow, GPA: 19.27/22
• 2016.9 – 2019.6, Hangzhou No 2 High School of Zhejiang Province
  • Full-time High School Student

🔬 Experience

• 2026.5 – 2026.8, General Motors
  • Research Intern
  • Mentors: Dr. Fan Bai and Dr. Chuan Li
• 2025.8 – Present, University of Southern California
  • Graduate Research Assistant
  • Advisors: Prof. Ramesh Govindan and Prof. Z. Morley Mao
• 2025.5 – 2025.8, Tsinghua University
  • Visiting Student
  • Advisor: Prof. Ju Ren
• 2023.9 – 2025.1, University of California San Diego
  • Research Assistant
  • Advisor: Prof. Xinyu Zhang

🎖 Scholarships and Awards

• 2023.4, First-class Honors Degree at University of Glasgow
• 2022.9, Outstanding Graduate of UESTC
• 2022.9, China National Scholarship (Top 0.2% undergrads nationwide)
• 2020.9, 2021.9, 2022.9, First-Class Outstanding Undergraduate Scholarship of UESTC

🤝 Service

• IEEE S&P 2027 Artifact Evaluation committee

Misc.

Outside of research, I spend my time on photography and road trips. I also play basketball, tennis, and soccer, and I box. As an undergraduate, I was captain of my college’s basketball team, and one of my photos won first place in a university-wide competition.