Zehua Cheng

I obtained by Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.

We build autonomous agents that reason over distributed, high-stakes data (Bio & Finance) without ever centralizing it. We replace trust with cryptography and replace correlation with causal/structural reasoning. For more details, please refer to my WORKING PROJECTS.

Currently, I am leading AI research at FLock.io, where I focus on advancing decentralized ML systems. I am now cooperate with Prof. Jim Davies and Prof Ivan Martinovic from University of Oxford.

News

04/2026 - TWO papers for SIE have been accepted in ACL 2026! (One Main, One Findings) Congratulations to ALL Authors!

03/2026 - Invited to serve as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.

03/2026 - One (And the first) paper for SIE has been accepted in ICME 2026! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

03/2026 - I am honored to announce that I will be serving as Vice Chair for the 6th Digital Twin International Conference (DigiTwin 2026). The event will be held in a hybrid format from August 4–8, 2026, at the University of Oxford, UK. DigiTwin is a premier global platform dedicated to advancing digital twin concepts, technologies, and interdisciplinary applications. I look forward to helping organize this prestigious event and collaborating with leading researchers and industry experts. Learn more about the conference here.

12/2025 - I received the 🏆 Best Paper Award (Industrial) from WI-IAT 2025! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

Open Opportunities:

FLock.io Oxford Phil in Computer Science Scholarship: Security of AI Systems

Selected Awards:

WI-IAT 2025 Best Industrial Paper Award - Scaling Decentralized Learning with FLock
AAAI 2024 Global Competition on Math Problem Solving and Reasoning Track 1 - Solution without API (3rd Prize) and Track 2 - Solution without API (2nd Prize).
Second Prize at KDD Cup 2024 - OAG Challenge AQA.
Third Prize at NeurIPS 2023: Open Catalyst Challenge
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022) Travel Grant
Championship at AWS Self-driving car racing challenge in 2021
Championship at ACM. MM GrandChallenge in Multi-Modal Video Identification Track in 2019

OMT

Beside the research in AI/ML, I also enjoyed working in Differential Geometry. Here are some of my latest research. I conduct these research purely out of interest (NO KPIs involved). For me, having enough time to conduct this research independently is very important. If you are interested about these proofs, please read HERE.