CV
Download PDF version hereClément DUMAS
Paris, France
Neel Nanda's MATS 7.0 scholar with experience in mechanistic interpretability and model diffing. Publications at ACL and NeurIPS 2025 and spotlights at mechanistic interpretability workshops.
Education 📚
- 2024-2025: Computer Science research Master MVA (Mathematics, Vision, Learning) at ENS Paris-Saclay. The ENS is a selective institution that trains teachers and researchers
- 2023-2024: Computer Science research Master MPRI at ENS Paris-Saclay.
- 2022-2023: Double Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at ENS Paris-Saclay
- 2020-2022: Completed "classes préparatoires", an intensive two-year programme in the sciences with 12 hours of math per week, preparing for the competitive entrance exams to the ENS
Research Experience 🔬 (✨ = led to a first-author publication)
- Since September 2025: Mentoring 5 junior researchers in the SPAR program to work on 2 model diffing projects: understanding model personas and disentangling fine-tuning objectives
- July 2025: Published a blog post explaining our motivation for working on model diffing, our paper, follow-up analysis and next steps
- Since May 2025 ✨: MATS extension in Neel Nanda's stream. I was awarded a 1-year scholarship to continue my model diffing research. We published our paper Overcoming Sparsity Artifacts in Crosscoders to Interpret Chat-Tuning at NeurIPS 2025. Our follow-up work "Narrow Finetuning Leaves Clearly Readable Traces in the Activation Differences" was spotlight at the NeurIPS 2025 mechanistic interpretability workshop
- Winter 2025: MATS 7.0 scholar in Neel Nanda's stream working on model diffing. An early version of our paper was published in the ICLR SLLMs workshop
- October 2024: Completed the Neel Nanda's MATS stream training phase. It ended with a 2 weeks research sprint where we replicated and extended the Crosscoder paper. See our demo Colab
- Summer 2024 ✨: 5-month research internship at EPFL with Robert West and Chris Wendler. Our work, Separating Tongue from Thought: Activation Patching Reveals Language-Agnostic Concept Representations in Transformers , was spotlight at ICML 2024 mechanistic interpretability workshop and accepted at ACL 2025 main conference
- July 2024: Attended the Human-aligned AI Summer School
- January 2024: Explored the emergence of XOR features in LLMs and the RAX hypothesis developed by Sam Marks.
- October 2023 - May 2024: Supervised Program for Alignment Research (SPAR) under the supervision of Walter Laurito. We tried to apply Contrast-Consistent Search to Reinforcement Learning models .
- Summer 2023: Two months research internship with Jobst Heitzig on Aspiration-Based Q-Learning
- 2022-2023: Participated in “Séminaire Turing”, an AI alignment reading group at ENS Paris-Saclay
- December 2022: Participated in the AI testing hackathon organized by Apart Research. Our submission about Trojans in transformers was ranked #4
- November 2022: Participated in the Interpretability hackathon organized by Apart Research
- November 2022: Participated in the ML4G, a one-week French AI alignment camp organized by Effisciences
- October 2022: Participated in the AI alignment Hackathon organized by EffiSciences
- 2021-2022: Implemented local playout optimization in a Monte-Carlo tree search for the travelling salesman problem
Programming Projects 🛠️
- Developed mechanistic interpretability tooling: nnterp (✨ poster at the NeurIPS 2025 mechanistic interpretability workshop), a wrapper around
NNsightfocused on LLMs and tiny-dashboard, a tool to visualize activations of SAEs - Early adopter of the mechanistic interpretability library
NNsight, actively engaging with the community to answer questions and improve it - Developed a CodinGame multiplayer game
- Ranked in top percentiles in CodinGame multiplayer bot programming contests: top 0.5%, 3% and 7% in 2021-2022
- Proficient in OCaml, Python, Java, PyTorch, and NNsight, with working knowledge of Rust, CUDA, C++ and others