SCIENTIFIC + HUMANISTIC

Integrated, or never separated?

Image

Hi, I am Junyi Tao.

My research lies at the intersection of AI and philosophy. I am especially drawn to questions about abstraction and explanation, which I approach both conceptually—through philosophy of AI and cognitive science—and empirically—through mechanistic interpretability.

I am currently a Research Fellow at Goodfire, working on the science of interpretability.
I recently completed an M.S. in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, where I was very fortunate to be advised by Thomas Icard and co-advised by Christopher Potts.
Before Stanford, I studied Data Science at Duke University and Duke Kunshan University, with a self-designed 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)

Internal Causal Mechanisms Robustly Predict Language Model Out-of-Distribution Behaviors [Paper] [Poster]
Jing Huang*, Junyi Tao*, Thomas Icard, Diyi Yang, Christopher Potts
In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.
Actionable Interpretability Workshop @ ICML, 2025, Oral Presentation 🌟

Inference and Verbalization Functions During In-Context Learning [Paper] [Poster]
Junyi Tao*, Xiaoyin Chen*, Nelson F. Liu
In Findings of the ACL: EMNLP, 2024.

Misc

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.

Menu