Zachary Burton

I am a recent graduate of MIT with SB in Mathematics.

Most recently, I was a Software Engineering Intern at Meta (Summer 2025), where I refactored the copyright enforcement pipeline.

I am extremely interested in about AI for mathematics. I was born in NYC and raised in the UK. Outside of research, I've ran track for 10 years! (10.63s 100m). Feel free to reach out if you want to chat!

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Zachary Burton

Research

RL Failure When Does Tabular RL Actually Break?
Blog Post, 2025
post

A systematic study of representation bottlenecks in symbolic algebra, testing where RL breaks on high school math.

Collision Collision Thresholds on Lattices
Preprint
arXiv

An expository derivation using Poissonization and Laplace asymptotics to analyze random walks on lattices.

LLM Persuasion Persuasiveness of LLMs in Political Discourse
paper

A study of how LLM-generated content shapes political persuasion and argumentation.

SIPGA SIPGA Scholar Research
A*STAR, 2023
materials

Conducted Reinforcement Learning research as a scholarship recipient.

Selected Projects

zOS demo zOS
github

Local LLM self-training loop with step-by-step feedback, written with Rust & Tauri.

Synthesis Engine Neurosymbolic Synthesis Engine

A C++ synthesizer featuring a custom AST, evaluator, and stochastic/beam search backends.

PIEFACE PIEFACE: Online RLHF Sandbox
website

An online sandbox for RLHF research. Built with a Flask backend and distributed PPO training loop.

Scribe Scribe AI
devpost

Autocomplete for math handwriting.

Speaking

Tonbridge Talk Being Black at Tonbridge
video

A reflection on my experience navigating race at a UK boarding school.

N-Word Talk Why White People Shouldn't Say the N-Word
video

A talk on language, power, and context.

Gauss Law Magnetic Gauss Law
video

A physics microlecture on electromagnetism.


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