Zerui Cheng (程泽瑞)

Zerui Cheng (程泽瑞)

Ph.D. Candidate at Princeton Univ., AI and Blockchain Researcher

Princeton University

Hi there, I’m Zerui Cheng (in Chinese：程泽瑞)~

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University advised by Prof. Pramod Viswanath. I am also a part-time student researcher at ByteDance Seed supervised by Dr. Jiashuo Liu. Before Princeton, I completed my B.Eng. in Computer Science from Yao Class at Tsinghua, graduating summa cum laude and earning the prestigious Yao Award.

My research interests lie at the intersection of AI evaluation, deployment, and blockchains. I aim to leverage technology to promote fairness and transparency in the AI era, with a strong focus on real-world impact. My work has contributed to the technical foundation (whitepaper) of high-profile startups: Sentient, Kite AI, and PolyHedra, etc..

Beyond research, I am an avid competitive programmer and a member of the Competitive Programming Hall of Fame. I previously served as President of the Yao Class Students’ Congress and was a contestant on the TV show “Super Brain Season 10” (最强大脑).

I’m always open to research and industry collaborations. Feel free to contact and chat!

Google Scholar profile       Curriculum Vitae

Interests
  • LLMs & Code Generation
  • Decentralized AI Systems
  • Blockchain & Cryptography
  • AI Benchmarking & Evaluation
Education

  • Ph.D. student (2023 - now)

    Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University

  • B.Eng. in Computer Science (2019 - 2023)

    Yao Class, the Insititute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University

Recent Highlights

[Oct 2025] (papers and acceptance notifications)

Several papers that I contributed to are online now, and will be presented in different venues in the near future!

First-author papers:

  • Paper 1: PeerBench Paradigm: We analyze the systematic challenges faced by AI benchmark paradigm today—data contamination, collusion, overfitting, etc, and propose PeerBench, a novel mechanism based on community contribution and reputation to reliably and efficiently measure data quality and build fair leaderboards. Our vision is to return AI evaluation to its role as a public good, aligning tech development with all humanity’s needs, not just those of a few giants. [Accepted to NeurIPS 2025]
  • Paper 2: OML Primitive: Are openness and commercial value mutually exclusive? In this paper, we go one step further than the original OML whitepaper of Sentient last year. We formalize the OML framework, exploring a path where models are open-access, but technical safeguards prevent misuse. OML offers a blueprint for sustainable, open AI governance and operation of next-gen AI. [Accepted to NeurIPS 2025 Lock-LLM]

Co-first-author papers:

  • Paper 3: CAIA (Crypto AI Agent Benchmark): The first AI agent benchmark in crypto and web3. Our results show that models aren’t yet reliable in this high-stakes, high-misinformation adversarial domain, and there is a giant gap to an ideal world where we can let AI reliably control users' wallets and manage real funds without risks. [Accepted to ICAIF 2025 AI4F, AI-R2D2]
  • Paper 4: AutoCode: The follow-up work to LiveCodeBench Pro crafted by the LiveCodeBench Pro dream team. We create a robust and efficient AI system that auto-generates coding problems to solve the data scarcity bottleneck.

Co-author papers:

  • Paper 5: NAO (Nondeterminism-Aware Optimistic Verification for Floating-Point Neural Networks): A crucial step for Decentralized AI, ensuring that AI inference results are reproducible and verifiable, so that the rights of end users are protected. It solves the bottleneck that we encountered in our Sakshi paper 2 years ago, and is a critical step for realizing our vision of a decentralized AI platform.
  • Paper 6: Kite AI Whitepaper: I co-authored the whitepaper for Kite AI as a research collaborator. Kite AI is building a native payment infrastructure for AI agents, and we depict the vision where agents transact autonomously with cryptographic accountability and traceability. Kite AI has raised $33 million from top–tier investors, including PayPal, General Catalyst, Coinbase Venture and leading blockchain foundations.

Among those, PeerBench and LiveCodeBench Pro will be presented at NeurIPS 2025 Main Conference in San Diego on Dec 3; CAIA will be presented at ICAIF 2025 in Singapore (AI4F on Nov 15, AI-R2D2 on Nov 16); and OML Primitive will be presented at NeurIPS 2025 Lock-LLM on Dec 6. Stay tuned for them!

[Oct 2025] (talk)
[Aug 2025] (talks)
[Jun 2025] (papers)

The AI benchmark paper LiveCodeBench Pro that I co-first-authored is online now!

  • LiveCodeBench Pro: We collaborated with elite competitive programmers to launch a continuously updated benchmark, precisely evaluating model capabilities on dynamic, high-difficulty coding tasks. The paper has been covered by MIT Tech Review and has already accumulated more than 1 million views on X [Accepted to NeurIPS 2025];
[Jun 2025] (talk)
[May 2025] (personal update)
  • Passed my Ph.D. general exam. I’m officially a Ph.D. candidate now!
  • Thank you to all my committee members: Prof. Chi Jin, Prof. Sanjeev Kulkarni, and Prof. Pramod Viswanath!
[Apr 2025] (poster presentation)
  • Poster presentation on OML at Citadel Securities PhD Summit 2025. Thank you Citadel Securities!
[Mar 2025] (papers)

Two AI benchmark papers that I co-authored are online now!

[Sep 2024] (paper)
  • The whitepaper on OML: Open, Monetizable and Loyal AI is live. Don’t hesitate to check it out!
  • Here is the link to whitepaper.
[Aug 2024] (personal update)
  • Started my one-month internship as a Quantitative Researcher at JQ Investment.
[May 2024] (personal update)
  • Started my internship as an AI fellow at Sentient.

Papers

For most recent updates, please refer to my Google Scholar profile. Here are some selected publications.

Major Projects with Real-World Impact

Recent Papers on AI Evaluation

Decentralized AI Platforms

  • Sakshi (2023) - Proof-of-Inference for decentralized AI
  • PoCW (APNET 2023) - AI computation as Proof-of-Work in blockchains

Contact