Alec Xu

Contact: alecx [at] umich [dot] edu

Hello! I'm currently a PhD student at the University of Michigan, where I'm fortunate to be advised by Qing Qu as part of the DeepThink Lab. I also collaborate closely with Laura Balzano. For Summer 2026, I will be a machine learning intern at Apple under Henning Tjaden and Baris Sen. Previously, I earned my MSE and BSE degrees also at the University of Michigan, where I worked with Jeff Fessler.

I have worked on a wide variety of problems. My PhD work has focused on theoretical foundations of deep learning and generative AI models. At previous internships before my PhD, I worked on deep learning and computer vision applications for problems in wireless communications and biomedical engineering.

CV (Updated May 2026) | Google Scholar | LinkedIn

Select Publications

• Alec S. Xu, Can Yaras, Matthew Asato, Qing Qu, Laura Balzano. Emergent Low-Rank Training Dynamics in MLPs with Smooth Activations. Under review.
• Soo Min Kwon*, Alec S. Xu*, Can Yaras, Laura Balzano, Qing Qu. Out-of-Distribution Generalization of In-Context Learning: A Low-Dimensional Subspace Perspective. AISTATS 2026.
• Alec S. Xu, Can Yaras, Peng Wang, Qing Qu. Linearly Separable Features in Shallow Nonlinear Networks: Width Scales Polynomially with Intrinsic Data Dimension. AISTATS 2026.
• Can Yaras, Alec S. Xu, Pierre Abillima, Changwoo Lee, Laura Balzano. MonarchAttention: Zero-Shot Conversion to Fast, Hardware-Aware Structured Attention. NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight).
• Alec S. Xu, Nina I. Shamsi, Lars A. Gjesteby, Laura J. Brattain. Self-Supervised Edge Detection Reconstruction for Topology-Oriented 3D Axon Segmentation and Centerline Detection. WACV 2024.
• Alec S. Xu, Laura Balzano, Jeffrey A. Fessler. HeMPPCAT: Mixtures of Probabilistic Principal Component Analysers for Data with Heteroscedastic Noise. ICASSP 2023.