people
Brussels, Belgium
Ward Gauderis
Hello! I’m a PhD researcher studying compositionality in AI — how explicit structure and emergent behaviour interact in intelligent systems. My work bridges symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, with a focus on models that are inherently interpretable by design and can reason and create in human-like ways.
How can the compositional design of a model’s structure improve its compositional behaviour?
My PhD project, Q-CHARM, explores this question by distinguishing between the architecture of a model (its compositional design) and the structure that emerges during learning (its compositional behaviour). The goal is to uncover how architectural inductive biases can support interpretability, generalisation, and creative reasoning. Learn more about my work here!
Antwerp, Belgium
Thomas Dooms
Hey! I’m a PhD student exploring weight-based interpretability. I’m interested in understanding how neural networks encode complex behaviours and knowledge.
Modern deep networks are astonishingly intricate and difficult to disentangle. I argue that we should embrace this complexity rather than shoehorn them into simplistic feature sets, flattening the very structures we hope to understand.
My work treats a model’s weights as a compositional system whose parts interact and recombine, much like phrases in a language. By developing flexible, formally grounded tools for compositional analysis, I aim to reveal how rich mechanisms and representations arise and how we can reason about them.