Zeyneb N. Kaya
Hi! I am Zeyneb, a student at Stanford University studying Computer Science + Mathematics. I broadly work on understanding and pushing the limits of AI, exploring robustness, learning from data (efficiently), and statistics/optimization––among other things.
Most recently, projects I've worked on include reasoning @ OpenAI, foundation models for physics/optimization as co-founder @ Topological (YC S25); decentralized AI+synthetic data @ Dria; and RL+diffusion LLMs @ Stanford.
I’m always eager to discuss interesting ideas—please reach out!When I'm not reading papers, I'll geek out over art/poetry/music, countries/geoguessr, linguistics, CATS, and whatever topic I've spiraled into.
zeynebnk [at] stanford [dot] edu
Research.
My work aims to advance our understanding of AI and its capabilities, and use that to improve them and push their limits in their fundamental challenges. I'm interested in robustness, data, and generalizability/distribution shifts, working in machine learning, statistics, and physics.
Listed below are selected relevant publications.
A PAPER??
??, Zeyneb N. Kaya
Under Review
OAI??
Zeyneb N. Kaya
OpenAI, 2026???
Semantic Anchoring in Large Language Models: Thresholds, Transfer, and Geometry
Edward Y. Chang, Zeyneb N. Kaya, Ethan Chang
PUBLISHED, 2025???
Measuring the Impact of Data Augmentation Methods for Extremely Low-Resource NMT
Zeyneb N. Kaya, Annie K. Lamar
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT) @ EACL, 2023
MADLIBS: A Novel Multilingual Data Augmentation Algorithm for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Zeyneb N. Kaya
Regeneron Science Talent Search, 2024
Full Scope Word Embedding Variability for Low-Resource Languages
Zeyneb N. Kaya, Annie K. Lamar
IEEE MIT URTC, 2023
Zeyneb N. Kaya
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA), 2023
Women in the Workplace: Analyzing Gender Biases in Corporate Email Communications
Zeyneb N. Kaya
International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2023
Zeyneb N. Kaya, Souvick Ghosh
arXiv preprint
Ahmet C. Genc, Zeyneb N. Kaya, et al
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 2021
Awards & Recognition.
Etched x Mercor x Cognition Hackathon – 1st Place/$40K Winner 2025
Regeneron Science Talent Search Winner – 5th Place/$90K Winner 2024
Coca Cola Scholar – 2024
PearVC x Anthropic Hackathon – 1st Place/Most Technical Winner, 2025
TreeHacks Scrapybara Prize – 1st Place/$16K-valued Winner, 2025
Geoguessr – Master Tier Player, 2025
National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (NJSHS) – National HM, 2nd Math/CS, 2023
Congressional App Challenge – 1st Place Winner, 2021
Olympiad in Linguistics (Onling) – 10th Place / 1st in USA, 2023
International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence – Team USA invited representative (did not attend due to conflicts)
Education.
2027
2024–2026 (2 years)
Relevant Coursework: ML; Deep NLP; Deep RL; Probability & Stochastic DiffEqs; Matrix Theory; AI & Language; AI & Reasoning; Statistical Mechanics of Computation.