David X. Wu
he/him/his
PhD Student, UC Berkeley
david_wu [at] berkeley [dot] edu
I am a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, where I'm extremely fortunate to be coadvised by Prasad Raghavendra and Anant Sahai.
I have recently been interested in LLM reasoning and RL for coding and math. Last summer, I was an ML research intern at Windsurf working on coding agent capabilities and evals. I'm grateful to be supported by an NSF GRFP fellowship and an OpenAI Superalignment Grant.
I'm also broadly interested in problems related to theoretical computer science and statistics, such as Markov chains, statistical inference, and machine learning theory.
I graduated with a B.Sc. from MIT with a double major in mathematics (Course 18) and computer science (Course 6-3), where I was lucky to do research with Justin Solomon and Suvrit Sra. As an undergrad, I interned in quant finance at HRT and Akuna Capital.
Selected Publications and Preprints
- arXiv Synthetic Error Injection Fails to Elicit Self-Correction In Language Models arXiv, 2025 arXiv
- arXiv Markov Chains Approximate Message Passing arXiv, 2025 arXiv
- STOC Weak Poincaré Inequalities, Simulated Annealing, and Sampling from Spherical Spin Glasses ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2025 arXiv
- ICLR Provable Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Benign Overfitting International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025 arXiv