Honam WONG

Honam WONG

First-year PhD @ UPenn, passionate about understanding deep learning & LLM

About me

Hi! I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Surbhi Goel (Computer Science) and Enric Boix-Adsera (Wharton Statistics & Data Science). I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Mathematics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2025.

My research interests lie in theory and empirical science of deep learning and LLMs. I am interested in designing minimal sandbox settings that are theoretically tractable while still illuminating fundamental principles of learning.

I am also interested in interpretability as an empirical lens for opening the black box of LLMs. More broadly, my interests in LLM lie in understanding the architecture, reasoning capabilities, and alignment properties via clean synthetic setup (In spirit of Physics of LLMs).

Overall I am passionate about opening the black box of neural network and LLM through all possible ways.

Education

  • PhD in Computer & Information Science, The University of Pennsylvania (Ongoing)
  • BSc in Computer Science & Mathematics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2025 (GPA 4.099/4.3, Rank 1st, before grad-school app.)
  • Spring Exchange, EPFL, 2024

Review Experience

  • Conference / Journal: NeurIPS 2025, ICML 2025, L4DC 2025, NeurIPS 2024, TMLR
  • Workshop: ICML 2024 Workshop on Theoretical Foundations of Foundation Models (TF2M), ICLR 2024 Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between Practice and Theory in Deep Learning (BGPT)

Selected Coursework

  • PhD: Machine Learning Theory, Generative AI for Research, Randomized Algorithm (Audit)
  • Undergraduate: Machine Learning, Optimization for ML, Functional Analysis, Numerical Analysis, Design and Analysis of algorithms

Selected Awards

  • Chern Class Achievement Scholarship (Outstanding) (Highest Award for math graduates)
  • HKUST Epsilon Fund Award 24’ (For top math students at HKUST, <5 undergraduates each year)
  • Hong Kong Government Scholarship 22’ (Highest Academic Award in undergraduate, renewed annually)

Academic Activities

  • Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Heidelberg, Germany, Sep 2024
  • LeT-All Mentorship Workshop, Learning Theory Alliance, Online, June 2024
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vienna, May 2024
  • Conference on Parismony and Learning (CPAL), Hong Kong, Jan 2024