“Generative AI and Entrepreneurship: A Spatial Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Approach.”
Authors: Junhui Cai, Yao Li, Gu Xian, Linda H. Zhao, Wu Zhu.
STAI-X Awards
STAI-X 2026 • Harvard University
STAI-X is honored to recognize the following outstanding papers, abstracts, and challenge entries.
Authors will be eligible for reimbursing costs to attend STAIX, up to determined limits.
Moreover, Paper Awards and Stellar Abstract Awards will be eligible for oral presentation at the conference.
Congratulations to all authors!
Paper Awards
“Membership Inference via Pairwise Likelihood Ratios.”
Authors: Shengjie Niu, Zebin Yun, Yeheng Ge, Jian Huang.
“CrossHONA: Cross-species HOmologous and Non-homologous gene-aware framework for transcriptomics integration and Annotation.”
Authors: Ruohan Wang, Yu Zhu, Zixiao Gao, Ying Ma.
“A Deep Generative Framework for Right-Censored Survival Data with Distribution-Matching Regularization.”
Authors: Yanran Li, Zexi Cai.
“Wahkon: A Statistically Principled Deep RKHS Superposition Network.”
Authors: Yongkai Chen, Wenxuan Zhong, Ping Ma.
“Variance-aware Reward Modeling with Anchor Guidance.”
Authors: Shuxing Fang, Ruijian Han, Liangyu Zhang, Fan Zhou.
“Density-Informed Pseudo-Counts for Calibrated Evidential Deep Learning.”
Authors: Pietro Carlotti, Nevena Gligić, Arya Farahi.
“STAVAT: Stratified Anytime-Valid Atom Sampling for LLM Tier Placement.”
Authors: Patrick Vossler, Fan Xia, Jean Feng.
“AI4BayesCode: From Natural Language Descriptions to Validated Modular Stateful Bayesian Samplers.”
Authors: Jungang Zou, Alex Ziyu Jiang, Qixuan Chen.
Paper Honorable Mentions
“Bridging Data Gaps in Oncology: Integrating Large Language Models and Recommendation Systems for Evidence Synthesis.”
Authors: Tengjie Tang, Angkai Li, Xuanyu Bai, Xingye Tan, Qingli Ji, Michael Ulis, Lu Si, Le Bao.
“NeuroMAS: Multi-Agent Systems as Neural Networks with Joint Reinforcement Learning.”
Authors: Haoran Lu, Luyang Fang, Wenxuan Zhong, Ping Ma.
“Learning Perturbations to Extrapolate Your LLM.”
Authors: Zetai Cen, Chenfei Gu, Jin Zhu, Ting Li, Yunxiao Chen, Chengchun Shi.
“VADR: Variance Adjusted Distribution Regression.”
Authors: Soumyabrata Bose.
“Black-Box Knowledge Transfer across Distinct Feature Sets.”
Authors: Oh-Ran Kwon, Daeyoung Ham.
“Bridging Probabilistic LLMs and Deterministic Statistical Validation: The PROVE Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Trial Reporting”
Authors: Zhaohua Lu, Cheng Zheng, Yuanyuan Han.
Stellar Abstract Awards
“Deciphering Small Sequence Differences in T Cell Receptor-Antigen Pairing.”
Authors: Yi Han, Tao Wang.
“Vertical Consensus Inference for High-Dimensional Random Partition.”
Authors: Khai Nguyen, Yang Ni, Peter Mueller.
“SPID: Distilled Protein Backbone Generation.”
Authors: Liyang Xie, Haoran Zhang, Zhendong Wang, Wesley Tansey, Mingyuan Zhou.
“Distributional Evaluation of Generative Models via Relative Density Ratio.”
Authors: Yuliang Xu, Yun Wei, Li Ma.
“Adaptive auditing of AI systems with anytime-valid guarantees.”
Authors: Siyu Zhou, Patrick Vossler, Venkatesh Sivaraman, Yifan Mai, Jean Feng.
“DML-BM: Double Machine Learning for Block-wise Missing Data with Applications in Alzheimer’s Disease Progression and Cognitive Functions.”
Authors: Borui Tang, Yue Yang, Ting Li, Tengfei Li, Hongtu Zhu.
“Precision Physical Activity Prescription via Reinforcement Learning for Functional Actions.”
Authors: Gefei Lin, Rui Miao, Jennifer Sacheck, Xiaoke Zhang.
“Incorporating LLM Embeddings for Variation Across the Human Genome.”
Authors: Hongqian Niu, Xihao Li, Didong Li.
“Strategic Feature Selection and Regularization.”
Authors: Jivat Neet Kaur, Pratik Patil, Divya M Shanmugam, Emma Pierson, Michael I. Jordan, Nika Haghtalab, Meena Jagadeesan, Ahmed Alaa, Serena Lutong Wang.
Challenge Awards
Award A — Statistical Prediction (Forecasting Accuracy)
Ranked by test-set MAE (lower is better).
1st Place — BiosForce
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longfei Zhang | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |
| 2 | Yin Liu | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |
| 3 | Shiyi Yang | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |
2nd Place — FQGroup
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yao Minhao | National University of Singapore |
| 2 | Fan Qiao | National University of Singapore |
| 3 | Wang Lingxi | National University of Singapore |
| 4 | Pei Yao | The University of Hong Kong |
3rd Place — kkkkk
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jiacheng Ge | New York University |
Honorable Mention — BostonCowboys
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Danny Lee | Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health |
| 2 | Bruce Zhou | Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health |
| 3 | Minjae Kim | Harvard College |
Award B — Autonomous Data-Analysis Agent
Ranked by mean per-task rank across Tasks 1–3 (lower is better).
1st Place — kkkkk
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jiacheng Ge | New York University |
2nd Place — Badgers
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Runxiong Wu | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| 2 | Chengpo Yan | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
3rd Place — Sentinelle
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quanjing He | Columbia University |
| 2 | Xiaoyu Zhang | Columbia University |
Honorable Mention (tie) — StaBio
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nianzhen Gu | UT MD Anderson Cancer Center |
| 2 | Yu Ding | UT MD Anderson Cancer Center |
| 3 | Ruonan Li | UT MD Anderson Cancer Center |
| 4 | Ali Parsaee | UT MD Anderson Cancer Center |
Honorable Mention (tie) — BIG-S2-C
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Estella Li | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| 2 | Jingyi Li | Tianjin University |
| 3 | Sophie Hall | Enloe High School |
| 4 | Valery Rivera | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Award C — Statistical Skill / Agent Module
Ranked by average reviewer total over C1 (Design) + C2 (Rigor) + C3 (Demo), /12.
1st Place — Biostat-Superpowers
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amiee Feiqing Huang | HSPH Biostatistics |
| 2 | Shuang Song | HSPH Biostatistics |
| 3 | Zongxin Yang | Harvard Medical School (DBMI) |
2nd Place — DGPForge
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longfei Zhang | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |
| 2 | Yin Liu | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |
| 3 | Shiyi Yang | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |
3rd Place — Sentinelle
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quanjing He | Columbia University |
| 2 | Xiaoyu Zhang | Columbia University |
Honorable Mention — Distill_Agent
| # | Name | Institute / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dewei Lin | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics) |