I'm a computer science master's student at USC and a researcher at the Mark & Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute. My work runs from real-time computer vision in production to LLM reliability to optimizer theory. It sounds scattered until you notice it is all one question: does this result hold up outside the conditions that produced it?
Chasing that question is most of what I actually do. At NUS I benchmarked five architectures before committing to one, because published numbers came from someone else's roads. On the Muon work I found the reference implementation was feeding 5D convolution weights into Newton–Schulz without matricizing them first, so every benchmark built on top of that was measuring a bug rather than an optimizer. I fixed it, pre-registered the decision rules, ran a 60-run ablation, and reported that the generalization effect I went looking for wasn't there.
Production taught me the same lesson from the other side. A detector that looks excellent on a clean test set and falls apart on a store's CCTV feed isn't a good model, it's an unfinished one, and the fix is usually in how the problem was framed rather than in the architecture. That's the work I want more of: machine learning with someone on the other end of it, built carefully enough that I can explain why it works.