Two Department of Statistics PhD Program students have earned national recognition in the 2026 Student Paper Competition hosted by the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS). Selected from a highly competitive pool of more than 90 submissions, PhD Students, Zhiyu Xu and Wenjin Zhang, were named among this year’s six award recipients, an outstanding achievement that reflects both the exceptional caliber of their work and the Columbia Statistics Department’s continued leadership in the field.

 

 Xu’s paper introduces an innovative “latency-response” framework that evaluates large language models not only by accuracy but also by the efficiency and depth of their reasoning, offering a powerful new lens on AI performance. Zhang’s research on discrete causal representation learning advances sophisticated methods for uncovering cause-and-effect relationships in complex data, with far-reaching implications across disciplines. Together, their work exemplifies intellectual rigor, creativity, and real-world impact. Both students will present their award-winning research at the Joint Statistical Meetings this August in Boston, where they will join a distinguished cohort of emerging scholars shaping the future of statistical learning and data science.