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!

Challenge Awards

Award A — Statistical Prediction (Forecasting Accuracy)

Ranked by test-set MAE (lower is better).

1st Place — BiosForce

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Longfei Zhang	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	longfeiz@unc.edu
2	Yin Liu	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	liuyinxd@gmail.com
3	Shiyi Yang	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	shiyi@unc.edu

2nd Place — FQGroup

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Yao Minhao	National University of Singapore	minhaoyaoooo@gmail.com
2	Fan Qiao	National University of Singapore	qiao.fan@duke-nus.edu.sg
3	Wang Lingxi	National University of Singapore	E1538207@u.nus.edu
4	Pei Yao	The University of Hong Kong	scpeiyao@gmail.com

3rd Place — kkkkk

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Jiacheng Ge	New York University	kevinge006@gmail.com

Honorable Mention — BostonCowboys

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Danny Lee	Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health	cmlee1006@gmail.com
2	Bruce Zhou	Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health	huiyuan.zhou237@gmail.com
3	Minjae Kim	Harvard College	mjkim1242@gmail.com

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	Email
1	Jiacheng Ge	New York University	kevinge006@gmail.com

2nd Place — Badgers

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Runxiong Wu	University of Wisconsin–Madison	calvin.wu@wisc.edu
2	Chengpo Yan	University of Wisconsin–Madison	cyan46@wisc.edu

3rd Place — Sentinelle

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Quanjing He	Columbia University	1253724476@qq.com
2	Xiaoyu Zhang	Columbia University	xz3423@columbia.edu

Honorable Mention (tie) — StaBio

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Nianzhen Gu	UT MD Anderson Cancer Center	ngu@mdanderson.org
2	Yu Ding	UT MD Anderson Cancer Center	yding4@mdanderson.org
3	Ruonan Li	UT MD Anderson Cancer Center	rli10@mdanderson.org
4	Ali Parsaee	UT MD Anderson Cancer Center	aparsaee@mdanderson.org

Honorable Mention (tie) — BIG-S2-C

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Estella Li	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	estellal@unc.edu
2	Jingyi Li	Tianjin University	chingiliq11@gmail.com
3	Sophie Hall	Enloe High School	sophiehall4848@gmail.com
4	Valery Rivera	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	frivera@unc.edu

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	Email
1	Amiee Feiqing Huang	HSPH Biostatistics	amieehuang56@gmail.com
2	Shuang Song	HSPH Biostatistics	shuangsong@hsph.harvard.edu
3	Zongxin Yang	Harvard Medical School (DBMI)	zongxinyang1996@gmail.com

2nd Place — DGPForge

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Longfei Zhang	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	longfeiz@unc.edu
2	Yin Liu	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	liuyinxd@gmail.com
3	Shiyi Yang	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	shiyi@unc.edu

3rd Place — Sentinelle

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Quanjing He	Columbia University	1253724476@qq.com
2	Xiaoyu Zhang	Columbia University	xz3423@columbia.edu

Honorable Mention — Distill_Agent

#	Name	Institute / Affiliation	Email
1	Dewei Lin	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Biostatistics)	lindewei0423@gmail.com

Paper Awards

“Generative AI and Entrepreneurship: A Spatial Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Approach.”

Authors: Junhui Cai, Yao Li, Gu Xian, Linda H. Zhao, Wu Zhu.

“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.