MBZUAI AI Engineering undergraduate

Building LLM systems, agentic workflows, and evaluation pipelines.

I am focused on LLM systems, agentic workflows, and model evaluation, with experience building data pipelines, PyTorch prototypes, and reliability-oriented AI applications. My current interests include statistical learning, sequence modeling, decision systems, NLP, and reliable LLM deployment.

Rui Gao GitHub avatar
B.S. in AI Engineering at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, expected Fall 2029.

Selected work

Research and builder projects

LLM inference policy evaluation

Deadline-Valid Replay

First-author ICML 2026 Hypothesis Testing Workshop project designing statistical evaluation methods for LLM inference policies under latency deadlines, separating leaderboard gaps from certified policy-level advantages.

Repository

LLM hidden-state geometry

Metric Choice Determines Semantic Geometry in LLM Hidden States

First-author ICML 2026 Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop project analyzing layerwise hidden-state geometry, showing raw L2 expansion is driven by norm growth while centered cosine better reveals semantic, topic, and category structure.

Repository

Natural-language scheduling product

Chronos: Natural-Language Scheduling

Built an application that converts natural-language scheduling requests into Google Calendar and Outlook events, including preview, edit, delete, multi-event requests, recurring schedules, relative dates, timezone handling, undo/redo, command persistence, auth, and API validation.

Repository

Controlled LLM generation

RLM: Defect-Guided Verifier Search

Ongoing ICML 2027-oriented project developing a controlled-generation system combining RLM-style hidden-context access with Defect-Guided Verifier Search over visible candidates, with typed schemas for facts, forbidden claims, constraints, verifier gates, repair targets, candidate logs, branch budgets, and token accounting.

NLP and digital humanities

AI Archaeology of Chinese Songci

Ongoing ISMIR 2027-oriented project building a Songci NLP pipeline over classical poetry JSON corpora, extracting cipai, line length, rhyme position, ping/ze tone, and rhythmic features into PyTorch sequence-modeling inputs.

Symbolic reasoning verification

SymStep

Co-developed step-level symbolic verification for LLM reasoning, using constraint propagation to check atomic deductions and strengthen constraint-dense logical reasoning.

Current focus

Questions I am building around

How should LLM inference policies be evaluated when latency, tokens, and compute are limited?

When do layerwise hidden-state distances support falsifiable semantic interpretations?

How can controlled generation improve validity without hiding quality or cost tradeoffs?

What can sequence models reveal about structure in classical Chinese poetry?

Signals

Education, research, and community

Education
B.S. AI Engineering, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, expected Fall 2029
Honors
MBZUAI Dean's List; Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Scholarship in AI Excellence; Pioneer Scholarship
Research
ICML 2026 Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, ICML 2026 Hypothesis Testing Workshop, and IJCAI/ECAI 2026 NILA Workshop
Leadership
President of the MBZUAI Climbing Club and founding student peer tutor for Calculus and Linear Algebra