About Me

I am a third-year PhD student studying theoretical computer science (TCS) in CMU, co-advised by William Kuszmaul and Guy E. Blelloch. I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Yao Class, Tsinghua University.

I mainly work on data structures, especially space-efficient and concurrent data structures. I also work on fast matrix multiplication.

Selected Publications

• Improving the Matrix Multiplication Exponent with Modern Optimization and AlphaEvolve
  Emilien Dupont*, Marvin Eisenberger*, Borislav Kozlovskii*, Abbas Mehrabian*, Francisco J. R. Ruiz*, Abigail See*, Renfei Zhou*, Josh Alman, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, and Matej Balog (*: equal contribution)
  arXiv preprint, 2026
• Fast Concurrent Primitives Despite Contention
  with Michael A. Bender, Guy E. Blelloch, Martín Farach-Colton, Yang Hu, Rob Johnson, and Rotem Oshman
  In SPAA 2026
• Succinct Dynamic Rank/Select: Bypassing the Tree-Structure Bottleneck
  with William Kuszmaul and Jingxun Liang
  In SODA 2026
• Static Retrieval Revisited: To Optimality and Beyond
  with Yang Hu, William Kuszmaul, Jingxun Liang, Huacheng Yu, and Junkai Zhang
  In FOCS 2025
• Optimal Static Dictionary with Worst-Case Constant Query Time
  with Yang Hu, Jingxun Liang, Huacheng Yu, and Junkai Zhang
  In STOC 2025
• More Asymmetry Yields Faster Matrix Multiplication
  with Josh Alman, Ran Duan, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, Yinzhan Xu, and Zixuan Xu
  In SODA 2025
• New Bounds for Matrix Multiplication: From Alpha to Omega
  with Virginia Vassilevska Williams, Yinzhan Xu, and Zixuan Xu
  In SODA 2024
  Covered in Quanta Magazine; Frontiers of Science Award 2025
• Faster Matrix Multiplication via Asymmetric Hashing
  with Ran Duan and Hongxun Wu
  In FOCS 2023
  Covered in Quanta Magazine; Frontiers of Science Award 2025
• Dynamic “Succincter”
  with Tianxiao Li, Jingxun Liang, and Huacheng Yu
  In FOCS 2023
• Tight Cell-Probe Lower Bounds for Dynamic Succinct Dictionaries
  with Tianxiao Li, Jingxun Liang, and Huacheng Yu
  In FOCS 2023
  Covered in Quanta Magazine

Misc

Chinese name: 周任飞
Pronunciation of my name: Renfei [ˈrɛnˌfeɪ], Zhou [ˈʒoʊ]. Sounds like “Ren-fay Joe”.
Sports: ping-pong, cycling (had a trip from Hangzhou to Beijing, 1700km on bike)
Erdős number: 3