LANG GAO
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Lang Gao 高朗

PhD student at MBZUAI
Mechanistic interpretability · Trustworthy AI

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天地有大美而不言,
四時有明法而不議,
萬物有成理而不說。

Heaven and earth hold great beauty, yet say nothing.
The seasons follow clear laws, yet offer no argument.
All things have their principles, yet give no explanation.

PROFILE

About

I am Lang Gao (高朗), currently a second-year PhD student at MBZUAI, a great place for research, and an algorithm intern at ByteDance. I'm fortunate to be supervised by Dr. Xiuying Chen, an outstanding rising star and a truly supportive mentor. I am also co-supervised by the excellent Prof. Preslav Nakov.

Previously, I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Technology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology ( HUST ) in 2025.

RESEARCH

Research interests

An ivory and bronze icosahedral framework

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PRIMARY

Mechanistic
interpretability

I study the mechanistic reasons why foundation models can do some things and cannot do others, and how we can use their nature to guide their behavior.

Understanding these mechanisms can make models more interpretable, controllable, and trustworthy — and offer new perspectives for exploring AI.

SELECTED RESEARCH

ICML 2026

The Cylindrical Representation Hypothesis for Language Model Steering

Research overview: The Cylindrical Representation Hypothesis for Language Model Steering

Lang Gao, Jinghui Zhang, Wei Liu, Fengxian Ji, Chenxi Wang, Zirui Song, Akash Ghosh, Youssef Mohamed, Preslav Nakov, and Xiuying Chen

"By relaxing the orthogonality assumption in the Linear Representation Hypothesis, we introduce a cylindrical structure that explains why steering directions often interact and lead to unstable behaviors."

SELECTED RESEARCH

ACL 2026Oral

When Personalization Tricks Detectors: The Feature-Inversion Trap in Machine-Generated Text Detection

Research overview: When Personalization Tricks Detectors: The Feature-Inversion Trap in Machine-Generated Text Detection

Lang Gao, Xuhui Li, Chenxi Wang, Mingzhe Li, Wei Liu, Zirui Song, Jinghui Zhang, Rui Yan, Preslav Nakov, and Xiuying Chen

"What if I told you your AI detector can still achieve a high AUC on random tokens? The first work to reveal the weak transferability of machine-generated text detectors on personalized content, along with its mechanistic interpretation."

SELECTED RESEARCH

Preprint

Evaluate Bias without Manual Test Sets: A Concept Representation Perspective for LLMs

Research overview: Evaluate Bias without Manual Test Sets: A Concept Representation Perspective for LLMs

Lang Gao, Kaiyang Wan, Wei Liu, Chenxi Wang, Zirui Song, Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Veselin Stoyanov, and Xiuying Chen

"BiasLens is a new interpretable method that directly examines concept representations inside LLMs to detect hidden biases, without relying on any human-labeled data."

SELECTED RESEARCH

ACL 2025

Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Models

Research overview: Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Models

Lang Gao, Jiahui Geng, Xiangliang Zhang, Preslav Nakov, and Xiuying Chen

"We interpret the common mechanisms of diverse LLM jailbreak attacks in the activation space and propose an efficient defense method."

SELECTED RESEARCH

ICLR 2026

A Fano-Style Accuracy Upper Bound for LLM Single-Pass Reasoning in Multi-Hop QA

Research overview: A Fano-Style Accuracy Upper Bound for LLM Single-Pass Reasoning in Multi-Hop QA

Kaiyang Wan, Lang Gao, Honglin Mu, Preslav Nakov, Yuxia Wang, Xiuying Chen

"An LLM's accuracy suffers a severe breakdown once the required information exceeds its internal capacity in complex multi-hop reasoning scenarios."

SELECTED RESEARCH

ICML 2025

Adversarial Cooperative Rationalization: The Risk of Spurious Correlations in Even Clean Datasets

Research overview: Adversarial Cooperative Rationalization: The Risk of Spurious Correlations in Even Clean Datasets

Wei Liu, Zhongyu Niu, Lang Gao, Zhiying Deng, Jun Wang, Haozhao Wang, and Ruixuan Li

"An interpretable, causal learning paradigm that simultaneously avoids spurious correlations in data and traditional self-interpretable models."

SELECTED RESEARCH

ICLR 2025

MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine

Research overview: MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine

Yunfei Xie*, Ce Zhou*, Lang Gao*, Juncheng Wu*, Xianhang Li, Hong-Yu Zhou, Sheng Liu, Lei Xing, James Zou, Cihang Xie, and Yuyin Zhou (*: Joint first authors)

"A comprehensive, large-scale multimodal dataset for medical vision-language models."

SELECTED RESEARCH

NeurIPS 2025

DyFlow: Dynamic Workflow Framework for Agentic Reasoning

Research overview: DyFlow: Dynamic Workflow Framework for Agentic Reasoning

Yanbo Wang, Zixiang Xu, Yue Huang, Xiangqi Wang, Zirui Song, Lang Gao, Chenxi Wang, Xiangru Tang, Yue Zhao, Arman Cohan, Xiangliang Zhang, and Xiuying Chen

"DyFlow is a dynamic workflow framework for LLM-based agents that adapts its reasoning steps in real time using intermediate feedback, enabling better generalization across diverse tasks."

EXPERIENCE

Experience

04/2026–10/2026

ByteDance

Algorithm Intern

02/2026–08/2026

Amazon

Research Collaboration

10/2024–07/2025

MBZUAI

Research Intern

07/2024–10/2024

University of Notre Dame

Research Intern

01/2024–06/2024

UC Santa Cruz

Research Intern

10/2023–12/2023

HUST

Research Experience

EDUCATION

Education

08 / 2025 - Now : Ph.D. student, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

09 / 2021 - 07 / 2025 : B.E., Huazhong University of Science and Technology

HONORS

Honors & awards

ARR Great Reviewer
ACL Travel Grant, 2026
ICML Travel Grant, 2026
ICML Silver Reviewer, 2026
Outstanding Research Contribution in NLP Award (Student Award Category, ~top 2%), 2025
ACL Travel Grant, 2025

SERVICE

Academic service

2026 | Reviewer ACL ICML EMNLP NeurIPS AAAI TMLR HISS
2025 | Reviewer ACL NeurIPS EMNLP NLPCC ICLR HISS

WRITING & EXPLORATION

Miscellany

BlogResearch blogEnglishRecursive Generalization and Superposition Are Both Right Mandarin National Undergraduate Innovation Project Documentation Mandarin Negative Transfer Mandarin Mixture of Experts Explained Mandarin EMNLP2020 Tutorial Notes (Explainable AI)

About the site design

This site imagines a world beyond human timescales. Warm, unfamiliar landscapes and intricate geometry reflect how much remains unknown: a quiet sense of awe, an openness to different ideas, and a love of exploring the world.

CONTACT

Get in touch.

I warmly welcome collaborations, especially on interpretability and trustworthy AI.

Original homepage ↗

Experience