SCIENTIFIC + HUMANISTIC

Integrated, or never separated?

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Hi, I am Junyi Tao.

I am a master’s student in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. I am advised by Thomas Icard, and also co-advised by Rosa Cao and Christopher Potts on my Master's thesis.
My research interests lie at the intersection of AI and philosophy—conceptually, in philosophy of AI and cognitive science, and empirically, in neural network interpretability. Central to my inquiry are questions of representation, abstraction, and levels of explanation.

Previously, I was an undergraduate at Duke University and Duke Kunshan University, where I studied Data Science with a customized concentration in Computational Humanities.
[Google Scholar] [CV]



Scholars have long employed a divisive lens to view science and humanities, with the former rapidly developing to replace human labor while the latter ultimately oriented around human interpretations. Such division in perspective also manifests itself in the division of scholarly communities that perceive themselves as having little to do with each other.

However, my experience researching at the intersection of the two revealed that this made us miss out on an enormous potential for the two domains to co-evolute and recursively augment each other. This motivates me to pursue an integrated approach to research that combines both.

I believe that it is the questions we ask, not the methods we employ, that can positively impact the world.


Publications

(* = Equal Contribution)

Estimating the Correctness of Language Model Predictions from Internal Causal Mechanisms
Jing Huang*, Junyi Tao*, Thomas Icard, Diyi Yang, Christopher Potts
Preprint, 2025.

Inference and Verbalization Functions During In-Context Learning
Junyi Tao*, Xiaoyin Chen*, Nelson F. Liu
In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2024.


Personal

Besides reading and writing, I enjoy designing and playing the ancient Chinese guqin (古琴) and zither (古筝) in the Stanford Baipu Chinese Music Ensemble.

I am always energized by inspiring conversations and meaningful connections. Drop me an email to say hello!

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