Biography

I am a fifth year PhD candidate 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.

Publications

F3: The Open-Source Data File Format for the Future
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
[paper] [code] [podcast]

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
[paper]

NULLS! Revisiting Null Representation in Modern Columnar Formats
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
[paper] [code] [slides]

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

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

Cornus: Atomic Commit for Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation
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
[paper] [arxiv] [code]

Experiences

HPC Intern - Ubiquant 12/2025 - 02/2026

Research Intern - Tencent 05/2025 - 08/2025

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

Software Engineer Intern - Huawei 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

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: Feb 2026