Ph.D. student in Computer Science · UCLA

Fred Xu

I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UCLA, researching probabilistic generative modeling, graph learning and uncertainty quantification, with applications to finance and science. Here I write about philosophy, about AI, about film, and about my research.

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Philosophy The Geometry of LoveAnne Carson draws desire as a triangle whose third point holds lover and beloved apart. Following her back to Sappho and Plato, this essay traces the shapes love draws in space and in time, and asks whether there is a love that is neither lack nor pure gift.

Philosophy Illusions and IllusionsThe Diamond Sutra cuts through illusion twice: once through the forms a mind takes to be solid, beginning with itself, and once more through the illusion of having seen through them.

Philosophy The Ontology of LoveWhat is this thing, love, that it binds two creatures to each other in life and in death? More fundamentally, what is being-in-love, and how is it related to being-in-the-world?

Philosophy The Philosophy of BoxingWhy would anyone choose to be hit in the head? Freud's death drive, Musashi's sword after the wars, and what boxing taught me about discipline, fear and flow.

Philosophy Reflection on my First Boxing Bout - A Warrior's JourneyWhat I learned from losing my first boxing match: sacrifice, the question of why, a sunrise on a trail, and fighting as a spiritual practice.

Philosophy Jim Simons, A TributeA tribute to Jim Simons, mathematician, codebreaker, investor and patron of science, and an inspiration of mine: on beauty, usefulness and what wealth can do for curiosity.

Philosophy Coffee Shop ReflectionsWhy I work best among strangers in a coffee shop, and whether the Paris café of Hemingway and the existentialists is a tradition or a fantasy sold by the cup.

AI The Virtue of FrictionSome friction only wastes our time, and some is how understanding is built and how hard work becomes absorbing. On learning, skill and flow when a machine can do the work.

Film The Hermeneutics of Samurai Culture in Film and TelevisionBefore my first boxing match I read Hagakure. Reading it again through Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Mishima, Jarmusch and Samurai Champloo, I find in the samurai ideal a modern invention and a masculine death drive, and in the best films its undoing.

Film Kwaidan: Strange Tales of Nature and WarMasaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan is usually filed under horror. Seen on a big screen, its four ghost stories read better as mysteries: about a nature full of spirits, and about the dead of a lost war.

Selected papers

NeurIPS 2026
Improving Function Space Flow Matching with Kernel Optimal Transport
Fred Xu, Thomas Markovich, Barbora Barancikova, Yizhou Sun
arXiv
NeurIPS 2026
Graph Anomaly Detection as Finite-Horizon Control: Training-Free Scoring via Empirical Bayes
Fred Xu, Thomas Markovich, Florence Regol, Yizhou Sun
arXiv
NeurIPS 2026
A Unified Uncertainty Representation for Graph Neural Networks via Doubly-Spectral Stochastic Expansion
Fred Xu, Thomas Markovich, Florence Regol, Yizhou Sun
arXiv
KDD 2026
FD-Bench: A Modular and Fair Benchmark for Data-driven Fluid Simulation
Haixin Wang, Ruoyan Li, Fred Xu, Fang Sun, Kaiqiao Han, Zijie Huang, Ching Chang, Xiao Luo, Wei Wang, Yizhou Sun · Co-first author
arXiv
NeurIPS 2025
Uncertainty Estimation on Graphs with Structure Informed Stochastic Partial Differential Equations
Fred Xu, Thomas Markovich
arXiv
Findings of ACL 2024
FUSE: Measure-Theoretic Compact Fuzzy Set Representation for Taxonomy Expansion
Fred Xu, Song Jiang, Zijie Huang, Xiao Luo, Shichang Zhang, Adrian Chen, Yizhou Sun
OpenReview arXiv