Xinming Tu

University of Washington. Seattle.

prof_pic_PKU.jpg

Weiming Lake, Bo Ya Ta, Peking University

I am a Founding Member of Technical Staff at Phylo and a final-year PhD student at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Sara Mostafavi.

My research centers on agentic science. I build rigorous benchmarks to understand how AI contributes to the research process and develop agentic architectures that make AI a better scientific collaborator—in a sense, “research about research.” Recent work includes BenchGuard (COLM 2026), BiomniBench, and DrugDiscoveryBench.

I also work on AI for regulatory genomics, developing deep learning methods for sequence-to-function prediction and multi-omics integration. Representative work includes SAGE-net (Nature Methods), CLUE (NeurIPS Oral), and DeepAllele (RECOMB 2026).

Before UW, I studied Biology and Computer Science at Peking University. Please see my CV for more information.

Selected Posts

Selected Publications

2026

  1. Afra Feyza Akyürek*, Xinming Tu*, Alec Gutmanstein, Jason Qin, Sofia Monasdotter, 15 more authors, and Sami Hassaan
    Scale Labs preprint 2026·Code·Supp·Blog·Website
    Benchmark of 82 expert-curated, verifiable early-stage drug-discovery tasks for evaluating coding agents across target identification, patent mining, structure-activity analysis, and lead optimization.
  2. Yuanhao Qu*, Yingzhou (Minta) Lu*, Xinming Tu, Serena Zhang, Tianwei She, 18 more authors, and Kexin Huang
    bioRxiv 2026
  3. Xinming Tu, Tianze Wang, Yingzhou (Minta) Lu, Kexin Huang, Yuanhao Qu, and Sara Mostafavi
    COLM 2026
  4. Xinming Tu, Anna Spiro, Maria Chikina, and Sara Mostafavi
    bioRxiv 2026
  5. Anna E Spiro*, Xinming Tu*, Yilun Sheng, Alexander Sasse, Rezwan Hosseini, 1 more author, and Sara Mostafavi
    Nature Methods 2026
  6. Xinming Tu*, Alexander Sasse*, Kaitavjeet Chowdhary*, Anna E Spiro, Liang Yang, 2 more authors, and Sara Mostafavi
    RECOMB 2026

2024

  1. Xinming Tu, Jan-Christian Hütter, Zitong Jerry Wang, Takamasa Kudo, Aviv Regev, and Romain Lopez
    MLCB 2024

2023

  1. Xinming Tu, James Zou, Weijie J. Su†, and Linjun Zhang†
    Harvard Data Science Review 2023

2022

  1. Xinming Tu*, Zhi-Jie Cao*, Chen-Rui Xia, Sara Mostafavi†, and Ge Gao†
    NeurIPS (Oral) 2022

2019

  1. Xiao Luo*, Xinming Tu*, Yang Ding, Ge Gao†, and Minghua Deng†
    Bioinformatics 2019