Hey, I'm Aaron ๐Ÿ‘‹

I build robots, train models, and make pixels move.

I'm an EECS student at UC Berkeley working at the intersection of robotics AI & LLMs and computer graphics. Currently a software engineer on autonomy behavior evaluation at Nuro.

Off the keyboard, you'll find me at the gym, playing video games, or out on a hike.

Portrait of Aaron Zheng
๐Ÿฆพ robotics
๐Ÿง  LLMs
๐ŸŽฎ graphics

01 Projects

Things I've built, broken, and rebuilt.

๐Ÿ›ก๏ธ

Low-Latency AI Guardrails

A method for building AI safety guardrails that cut latency by 99% without sacrificing performance, tested on an open-source safety dataset.

AI SafetyCOLING 2025

NOME / JIPCAD

Built a VSCode extension for the NOME language, designed knot structures, and implemented shelling, merging, offsetting, and color-changing in this open-source 3D CAD tool.

CADOpen source

Little tools

02 Experience

Where I've been spending my days.

  1. 2026

    Software Engineer, Autonomy โ€” Behavior Evaluation

    Nuro

    • Building data cleaning, preprocessing, and analysis pipelines.
    • Productionizing model-based approaches for evaluating autonomous vehicle behavior.
    • Working on Eval for World Models
  2. 2025 โ€“ 2026

    Researcher

    Berkeley Sky Computing Lab ยท SkyRL

    • Built tooling to merge sharded FSDP model tensors in each RL training checkpoint into a single .safetensors file.
    • Integrated SkyRL-train into rLLM as a supported backend trainer through a new API.
  3. 2024 โ€“ 2025

    AI Scientist

    Uniphore

    • Developed AI safety methodologies, including novel guardrail models.
    • Developed versatile topic classifiers.
  4. 2023 โ€“ 2024

    Peer Leadership Consultant

    UC Berkeley ยท Organizational Advising & Student Involvement Services

    • Processed official registration of student orgs and their signatories.
    • Staffed the front desk answering questions from student orgs.
    • Helped design a new training website for signatories.
  5. 2023

    Language Engineering Intern

    Ivoyant

    • Built and debugged parsers and language models to analyze JSON files of user data.
    • Built a data-mapping app feature that maps source to target schemas from parsed user-input expressions.

03 Academics & Writing

Papers and course projects I'm proud of.

Publications

04 Now & Interests

What I'm into these days. TODO: fill me in

Let's chat over tea ๐Ÿต

Robotics, LLMs, graphics, or a good hiking trail โ€” I'm always happy to talk.