Hello! 🐈‍⬛

University of British Columbia · alexf01@cs.ubc.ca

I am a master's student at the University of British Columbia advised by Peter West, where I work on analysis and understanding of language models.

During my undergrad, I was a visiting researcher at Johns Hopkins University advised by Najim Dehak and Thomas Thebaud. While visiting JHU, I had the opportunity to work on very cool speech stuff; such as backdoor attacks on speech language models. I completed my B.Eng at ÉTS in Montréal (where I am from!), advised and mentored by Patrick Cardinal.

My research interests are numerous and everchanging. At the moment, I think about how knowledge is learned, transformed and shaped through the training stages (from pretraining to post-training). More broadly, I also think about LLMs under a natural science lens. For example, are LLMs capable of creativity? Or should the term creativity be reserved to sentient beings?

I love to talk about anything (really); please do not hesitate to reach out!