Minxuan Duan

(she/her)

PhD Student

  • Artificial intelligence  
  • Machine learning 
  • MS in Statistics, University of Chicago 
  • BS in Statistics, Peking University — China 

Minxuan Duan is a PhD student in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. She is advised by Hongyang Zhang. 

With a background in statistics and mathematics, Duan is motivated by a desire to understand why machine learning systems behave the way they do and how to express those behaviors in clean mathematical terms. She has been working on mechanistic interpretability and geometric analysis of representations, focusing on how features and concepts emerge in high-dimensional models. She is also interested in translating insights into real-world domains such as mobility modeling. Now Duan is studying Hessian-informed multitask learning and multi-agent systems, as well as game theory.  

Duan joined Khoury College in 2025, drawn by the college’s machine learning and AI community and by its culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Before beginning her PhD, she held machine engineering roles at Meituan, the Alibaba Group, and Novateur Research Solutions, where she improved performance and efficiency for numerous models, algorithms, and reinforcement learning agents.