Zhuofan Josh Ying

I'm a third-year PhD student in the Visual Inference Lab at Columbia University, supervised by Prof. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte.

Previously, I received my B.A. in Computer Science and Philosophy from UNC Chapel Hill. Before that, I briefly pursued a B.S. in Physics at USTC.

I'm generally interested in Computational Neuroscience, AI Safety, and Philosophy of Mind, with a focus on interpretability and alignment.

Email / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github

Research

Interpretability AI Safety

Token Entanglement in Subliminal Learning

Amir Zur, Zhuofan Ying, Alexander Russell Loftus, Kerem Şahin, Steven Yu, Lucia Quirke, Tamar Rott Shaham, Natalie Shapira, Hadas Orgad, David Bau

NeurIPS 2025, Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop

paper / code

Interpretability

Adaptive Contextual Perception: How to Generalize to New Backgrounds and Ambiguous Objects

Zhuofan Ying, Peter Hase, Mohit Bansal

NeurIPS 2023

paper / code / bibtex

Interpretability Alignment

VisFIS: Visual Feature Importance Supervision with Right-for-the-Right-Reason Objectives

Zhuofan Ying*, Peter Hase*, Mohit Bansal

NeurIPS 2022

paper / code / bibtex

Evaluation

Can deep learning recognize subtle human activities?

Vincent Jacquot, Zhuofan Ying, Gabriel Kreiman

CVPR 2020

paper / code / bibtex

Experience

Constellation, Visiting Fellow
2025 Sep - 2025 Dec

Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative (CBAI)
2025 Jun - 2025 Aug
Supervised by Prof. David Bau

Columbia University, Issa Lab
2022 May - 2023 Jun
Supervised by Prof. Elias Issa

UNC Chapel Hill, MURGe-Lab
2021 Aug - 2023 Jun
Supervised by Prof. Mohit Bansal

Tsinghua University, Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence (THBI)
2020 Nov - 2021 Apr
Supervised by Prof. Jia Liu

Tencent, Lightspeed & Quantum Studio
2020 May - 2020 Oct
Supervised by Dr. Runze Zhang

Harvard Medical School, Kreiman Lab
2019 Jan - 2019 Jul
Supervised by Prof. Gabriel Kreiman

iFlytek, AI Service Department
2018 Apr - 2018 Aug
Supervised by Dr. Xiaowei Fang and Dr. Yu Di