Read my name

宁若汐 (Nìng Ruòxī, nɪŋ51 ʐuɔ51 ɕi55)

Journey: when I work

My work so far has touched on long-context benchmarking, vision-language model interpretation, and computational stylistics. Although these projects differ in their immediate goals, they have led me toward a common set of questions about what language and vision-language models encode, how those representations can be interpreted, and what they may reveal about language, meaning, and abstraction beyond the engineering task itself.

Looking ahead, I hope to develop a stronger foundation in machine learning theory and optimization, not as an end in itself, but as a way to better understand why interpretability methods succeed or fail, and what would be required for models to handle language in more faithful and generalizable ways. At the same time, I have been reading more in philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. Influenced in part by works such as Gödel, Escher, Bach and by Deleuze, I am interested in how humans recognize, abstract, and transfer structure across domains such as literature, painting, and music, and whether aspects of this capacity can be formalized computationally.

More broadly, I am drawn to questions about how computational tools may contribute to scientific discovery, especially when they are used not only to automate tasks, but also to clarify patterns, generate new conceptual frameworks, or expose limits in existing ones. These interests are still developing, but they form the larger intellectual direction behind my current and future work.

• Interpretability:
  Presentation, Two Approaches for Exploring Linguistic Competence in Language Models: Representation and Behavior, ZJU SIS, Apr 16, 2026.

Journey: when I break

My leisure time inspires me a lot.

• Game:
  I play PuzzleHunt, Geoguessr, and Sokoban-like and Obra-Dinn-like puzzle games.
• Design:
  I was an amateur painter and graphic designer.
  Design Department Member, QSC, ZJU, 2019–2020.
  Design Department Staff, QSC, ZJU, 2020–2022.
• Music:
  Piano, Grade 8, Chinese Musicians Association Test. Fond of classical music, opera, and musicals.
• Literature:
  Fan of modernism narration, e.g., Jorge Luis Borges.
• Philosophy:
  I’m reading about philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and epistemology.
  Presentation, Intro to Philosophy of Language, WestlakeNLP, Nov 9, 2022.