Ameya Panchal

CS, physics & AI at Penn State.Independent interpretability research.

My neutron-star paper is in peer review, and I am transitioning into AI safety research in mechanistic interpretability. Currently I am developing measures for internal monitoring when a model's chain of thought becomes illegible.

The road

SEP2026

SPARCurrent

Mentee researcher, with two fellow mentees

Do residual-stream probes survive degrading chain-of-thought legibility? Testing whether classifiers on a model's internal activations still catch harmful reasoning as its written reasoning degrades.

JUL2026

Independent researchOngoing

Mechanistic interpretability

Circuits and lenses in GPT-2, Pythia, Qwen3 and Gemma-2, with PyTorch and TransformerLens. Every figure regenerates from a public repository.

• The J-lens offset is the model's token frequencySubtracting it hurts; z-scoring it helps
• An induction head in disguiseChasing grammar in a character-level transformer

More

• A dead-ReLU absorbing stateWhy one architecture in a memorization challenge barely learns
• Every method has a blind spotReading GPT-2's IOI circuit three ways
• A statue with reflexesCloning an expert taught the policy to walk, not where

JUN2026

Penn State Multi-Campus REU

Undergraduate researcher, advised by Prof. Asif ud-Doula

The paper in peer review today started here: X-ray photons scattering through a neutron star's atmosphere, simulated to measure the error a common assumption introduces. First author, under review at Astrophysics and Space Science.

• Where the error hidesThe isotropy bias in neutron-star pulse profiles

FEB2026

CrashAICurrent

Founder & technical lead, team of three

A crash-risk analysis platform: a crash-severity model with per-site explanations and what-if simulation. First of 40 teams at the Nittany AI Challenge 2026.

DEC2025

Nittany AI Advance

Application specialist, team of five · through April 2026

An OCR, LLM and regex pipeline that extracts metadata from scanned project documents, for Penn State's Office of the Physical Plant.

AUG2024

The Pennsylvania State UniversityCurrent

B.S. Computer Science, minors in Physics and AI

Schreyer Honors College. Expected May 2028.

End of the road, for now.

Thanks for walking it with me.

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