About Me
I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Prof. Junjie Hu, and I'm fortunate to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). I previously earned my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Research Interests
My research seeks to understand model reasoning as an emergent capability across diverse settings, evaluate whether it is faithful, trustworthy, and safe, and harness it to build AI systems that can improve themselves. I approach these questions through:
AI Safety
Understanding and mitigating harmful behaviors in reasoning models
- Mechanistic interpretability
- Chain-of-thought faithfulness & monitorability
- Jailbreak analysis & robustness
- LLM-as-judge evaluation & reliability
Self-improving Agentic Systems
The development of agentic systems that improve their own reasoning in open-ended settings
- Open-ended & evolutionary search (e.g., DGM / AlphaEvolve-style methods)
- Self-evolving systems & recursive self-improvement
- Evaluator design & reward modeling
- Test-time adaptation & inference-time scaling
Publications
2026
When Safety Fails Before the Answer: Benchmarking Harmful Behavior Detection in Reasoning Chains
We introduce a step-level taxonomy and an annotated dataset HarmThoughts, that traces how harm emerges and propagates through a model's reasoning.
2026
Fluent but Unfeeling: The Emotional Blind Spots of Language Models
We introduce EXPRESS, a benchmark of 251 fine-grained, self-disclosed emotion labels from Reddit, and show that even strong LLMs struggle to match how people actually describe their own emotions.
Awards
Personal
I love graphic design and calligraphy! Check out my work here.