Zhaofeng Zhang

About me

I am a PhD student at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, mentored by Shay Cohen and Tiejun Ma. 

Before joining UoE, I earned my master's degree in Quantitative Finance and Risk Management in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, I received my bachelor's degree in Financial Mathematics at the Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University (formerly BNU-HKBU UIC).

You may also find my Google Scholar and LinkedIn.

Research interests:

• FinAI

• Quantitative Finance

• Machine Learning (for finance)

• Large Language Model

Publications and preprints

• Quantformer: from attention to profit with a quantitative transformer trading strategy; Z Zhang, B Chen, S Zhu, N Langrené; Expert Systems with Applications 313 131567 (2026). Journal Version.

• Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language models; B Chen, Z Zhang, N Langrené, S Zhu; Patterns 6(6) 101260 (2025). Journal Version.

• Adaptive Dueling Double Deep Q-networks in Uniswap V3 Replication and Extension with Mamba; Z Zhang. ArXiv:2511.22101.

• Evolving in the Agent Jungle via History-Informed Opponent Awareness; Z Zhang, L Xia, R Liu, Y Wang, B Shen, S Zhu; ArXiv: 2608.02005.

• LoCA: Forward-Only LLM Tuning after One-Shot Calibration  with Local Credit Assignment; L Xia, R Liu, Z Zhang, Y Wang, B Shen, S Zhu; ArXiv: 2608.03020.

• Exploring the quality of automatic speech translation of accented English speeches into Chinese; W Xiao, Z Zhang, K Luo; Data Intelligence; To appear.

• Chebyformer: quantitative financial factor model with Chebyshev attention; Z Zhang, D Huang, S Zhu, N Langrené; To appear.

Conference presents

• Session Chair, "Portfolios III", SIAM Conference on Financial Mathematics and Engineering (FM25), Florida, July 2025

• 5th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF'24), New York University, New York, November 2024

• International Conference on Stochastic Analysis and Differential Equations (ICSADE), Zhuhai, China, November 2024

• 8th International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing (ICSP), Xi'an Shiyou University, Xi'an, April 2023

Awards

1.  Editors’ picks best paper of 2025, Patterns by Cell Press, 2026.

2.  Winner of the Manuel track in IMC Prosperity 4, IMC Trading, 2026.

3.  Outstanding Final Year Project, Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, 2024.

4.  National Second Prize, Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modelling, 2022.