Tianze (Etha) Hua

1st-year CS PhD Student
Brown University

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Currently based in Providence, Rhode Island
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About

CV

Twitter | GitHub | Google Scholar | Semantic Scholar

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Brown University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Ellie Pavlick.

My research focuses on interpretability and human-model comparison. I believe for us to attribute cognitive properties (m knows p, m understands English, m is conscious, and etc.) to computational models, two components are required: (a) operationalized definitions of those cognitive properties, and (b) sufficient knowledge of the inner workings of the computational models of interest. While the first component has been the subject of lengthy debates in philosophy of mind / epistemology and may remain unresolved, the second component offers a domain, interpretability, where concrete answers are achievable.

To get a better understanding of the internal mechanisms in LLMs, I am currently investigating the modularity of representations and circuits in transformer models.

Updates

Publications

Education

2025-
Ph.D. Computer Science, Brown University
2023-2025
Sc.M. Computer Science, Brown University
2019-2023
B.S. Computer Science & Philosophy, Tufts University

some other cool stuffs

> A tree defined by a Lindenmayer system.

> Order and chaos generated with the rule110 cellular automaton.

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