Alan Sun

About Me

This fall I will matriculate as an MSCS student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Currently, I am a visiting scholar at the Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems advised by Mariya Toneva. I earned my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at Dartmouth College with high honors. At Dartmouth, I conducted research with Soroush Vosoughi where I worked to create mathematical frameworks that enable the characterization of robustness of language models. My honors thesis, Acheiving Domain-Independent Certified Robustness via Knowledge Continuity, was awarded First Prize for Oustanding Research in Computational Sciences by the Neukom Institute as well as the John G. Kemeny Computing Prize for Innovation.

My current research focuses on interpreting the mechanisms of artificial neural networks through circuit discovery.

Research

I am interested in improving the robustness of deep learning models by proving tight certifications and discovering novel adversarial examples. I am also interested in uncovering the mechanisms that enable their decision making. Through explorations of both these subfields, I wish to expose the opaque links between them.

Publications