Biography

I am a fifth year PhD student at IIIS, Tsinghua University. My advisor is Huanchen Zhang. I also work closely with Andy Pavlo. I graduated with distinction from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, advised by Xiangyao Yu. My research interests include multi-modal data lake, data infra for AI, and columnar file formats.

I am looking for industry positions starting from summer 2026.

Publications

F3: The Open-Source Data File Format for the Future [code]
Xinyu Zeng, Ruijun Meng, Martin Prammer, Wes McKinney, Jignesh M. Patel, Andrew Pavlo, Huanchen Zhang
[SIGMOD’26] Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data

Towards Functional Decomposition of Storage Formats
Martin Prammer, Xinyu Zeng, Ruijun Meng, Wes McKinney, Huanchen Zhang, Andrew Pavlo, Jignesh M. Patel
[CIDR’25] Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research

NULLS! Revisiting Null Representation in Modern Columnar Formats [code] [slides]
Xinyu Zeng, Ruijun Meng, Andrew Pavlo, Wes McKinney, and Huanchen Zhang
[DaMoN’24] Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware

LeCo: Lightweight Compression via Learning Serial Correlations [arxiv] [code]
Yihao Liu, Xinyu Zeng, Huanchen Zhang
[SIGMOD’24] Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data

An Empirical Evaluation of Columnar Storage Formats [extended version] [code] [slides]
Xinyu Zeng, Yulong Hui, Jiahong Shen, Andrew Pavlo, Wes McKinney, Huanchen Zhang
[VLDB’23] Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

Cornus: Atomic Commit for Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation [arxiv] [code]
Zhihan Guo, Xinyu Zeng, Kan Wu, Wuh-Chwen Hwang, Ziwei Ren, Xiangyao Yu, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Philip A. Bernstein
[VLDB’22] Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

Experiences

Research Intern - Tencent 05/2025 - 08/2025

Software Engineer Intern - RisingWave 02/2021 - 07/2021

Software Engineer Intern - Huawei Cloud 05/2019 - 07/2019

Teaching

Tsinghua University:

• TA - Database Systems, Spring 2023

UW-Madison:

• Peer mentor - CS537 Intro to Operating System, Spring 2020
• Peer mentor - CS577 Intro to Algorithms, Fall 2019

Advising

I am keen to help and collaborate with junior students. I have advised multiple Yao class undergraduates’ theses, including:

• Bit-Column (2023)

• Flexible Dictionary Scope (2025)

• General Cascaded GPU Decompression (2025)

• Robotics Training Infra (ongoing) (2026)

Awards

Excellent Comprehensive Scholarship of Tsinghua University (清华之友-陕西宝鸡英才奖学金), 2025

Excellent Comprehensive Scholarship of Tsinghua University（清华之友—张明为奖学金&西安交叉信息核心技术研究院奖学金), 2024

UW-Madison CS Departmental Scholarship, 2021

Site last updated: November 2025