Research Notes
Short distillations of papers I have an opinion about — what the work shows, and what I think it misses.
Conformal guarantees are only as honest as the exchangeability they assume
This is the cleanest demonstration I know that you can wrap a language model's output in a distribution-free correctness guarantee instead of a vibe. What I keep flagging is the fine print. The guarantee rides on exchangeability, and the settings I actually care about, agents acting over time, multimodal inputs, free-form generation, low-resource languages, are exactly the ones where exchangeability quietly fails. I read this less as a solved problem and more as the strongest available foundation to build the non-exchangeable, multimodal version on. That gap is most of why I think guaranteed abstention is still wide open.
Read the paper →We can steer a model toward honesty. We have only checked that in English
Representation engineering made the case that high-level properties like honesty and harmlessness live in directions you can read off and push on, and it is fast becoming part of the default safety toolkit. My worry is methodological. Almost every result is validated in English, and we keep treating the probes and steering vectors as if they were language-agnostic without checking. If an honesty direction transfers cleanly to a low-resource language, that is a strong and useful claim. If it fails silently, we have shipped a monitor that is blind exactly where human oversight is already thinnest. Either way someone has to test it, and that is squarely the work I want to do.
Read the paper →Featured In
AI rules in SEA: the risks, the fines, what you need to know
Featured coverage on AI regulation across Southeast Asia, examining the emerging rules, enforcement risks, and compliance requirements shaping the region's AI landscape.
@feliren
Thoughts on life, philosophy, AI, research, and engineering from my Medium articles.
Your model just killed someone's grandmother: Why every production ML needs conformal prediction
How conformal prediction gives you honest uncertainty quantification with mathematical guarantees that actually hold in production.
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We all think our map is the territory
On ethnocentrism as an invisible cultural default, why our own cultural frameworks feel like objective reality, and what it takes to build global teams that can genuinely hold multiple maps at once.
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My initial exploration on Trustworthy AI
First encounters with Trustworthy AI, bridging information theory and responsible machine learning.
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Quality and Reliability for AI Engineers
A practical guide to building quality and reliability into AI systems, covering evaluation frameworks, failure modes, and engineering practices that keep production AI trustworthy at scale.
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The cost of becoming
A poem for the people who are tired of waiting for themselves.
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Four hours, one vendor, one airline
What a four-hour American Airlines booking outage reveals about the compounding costs of vendor dependency in modern infrastructure.
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If everyone forgets, why be good
On why moral action still matters even when no one remembers, exploring Mother Teresa, Aristotle, and what we owe to the universe.
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The art of letting go while still caring
What I learned from trying to control everything and ending up with nothing.
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Meditation. 7 days. No phone. Noble silence.
A data-driven researcher's journey into 7 days of silent meditation at Taman Brahma Bali Usada.
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Phoenix Protocol: Rising from the ashes of adversity
On resilience, reinvention, and learning to rise again after failure and loss.
Read on Medium →Privacy Matters: Navigating the Digital Age with Confidence
Discussing data synthesis, privacy-preserving analytics, and responsible data stewardship.
Read on Medium →Mental Health Matters: Please Take Care
A personal reflection on mental health awareness, self-care, and breaking the silence.
Read on Medium →A Stranger's Guide to the IU Concert
Reflections on fandom, culture, and music through the lens of an IU concert experience.
Read on Medium →Gone from social media for 4 years. Now I am back
Returning to social media after 4 years, reflections on digital presence and personal growth.
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