Muhammad Saram Hassan
Based in: Lahore, PakistanCurrently: Research Intern, SRI InternationalExperience: 5 years
Experience
Research Intern
Summary
What I did
- Conducting large-scale reproduction of 'Potemkin Understanding' across 7 LLMs, identifying critical methodological fragilities.
- Implementing activation steering strategies (definition-addition vs. difference-based) on Llama-3.2-3B.
- Analyzing cross-lingual contradiction hypotheses using CKA-based geometric stability.
Results
- Developed the Concept Coherence Metric (CCM) to unify five fragmented evaluation silos: behavioral consistency, internal representation, causal intervention, robustness, and domain-specific semantics.
- Introduced the Latent Direction Score (LDS) using Sparse Autoencoders to causally improve concept application via activation steering (+4.38pp in Classify tasks).
- Identified up to 31% variance in Potemkin scores across runs, surfacing significant stochastic instability in current conceptual understanding benchmarks.
- Verified computational reproducibility of Procedure 1 from Mancoridis et al. (ICML 2025) with max absolute deviation of 0.006.
- Manuscript submitted to ACM REP 2026.
- Identified judge sensitivity as a major confounder in LLM evaluation pipelines.
Research Assistant
Summary
What I did
- Leading an SoK on vulnerabilities in autonomous web agents, distinguishing agentic risks from traditional crawler exploits.
- Architecting a synthetic adversarial HTML testbed with attack primitives like MCP poisoning and CSS obfuscation.
- Developing a behavioral fingerprinting framework analyzing HTTP headers and DOM traversal to detect LLM agent traffic.
Results
- Authored a full Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper on prompt injection threats in LLM-powered agents.
- Developed a novel 12-class attack taxonomy based on semantic channels (e.g., RAG poisoning, tool-mediated hijacking, obfuscated HTML).
- Identified the 'reasoning gap': stronger models like Claude 3.7 are immune to direct injection but highly vulnerable to memory injection (55.1% ASR).
- Discovered that LLM browsers bypass robots.txt while masquerading as human users, triggering programmatic ad-auctions.
- Synthesized empirical findings across 12+ major benchmarks including WASP, Mind the Web, and AgentDojo.
Teaching Assistant
Summary
What I did
- Conducted weekly office hours for 300+ students in Discrete Mathematics (CS-210).
- Led tutorials and lab sessions for Computational Problem Solving (CS-100).
- Developed supplementary problem sets and graded research projects.
Skills
Technical
Python
PyTorch
C/C++
Git
Linux/Bash
OpenCV
TensorFlow
Figma
Go
Node.js
Docker
ReactLanguages
Projects
Voice AI for Regional Languages
Evaluating Architectural Bias and Generalization in Vision Models
Chrono Savior — 2D Time-Travel Adventure Game
LLM Password Generation: Security, Usability & Policy Compliance
Raft-Based Fault-Tolerant Distributed Key-Value Store
Reproducing "Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models"
Federated Learning Under Data Heterogeneity
Knowledge Distillation: Feature Alignment & Contrastive Representations
Model Compression via Structured and Unstructured Pruning
Deep Unfolding for Robust Neural Network Design
Systems Programming: Shell, Malloc & GC
Education
Bachelor of Science
Coursework
Societies & activities
A-Levels
Thesis. SAT: 1530 (800 Math, 730 EBRW) | 100% Merit Scholarship
Societies & activities
O-Levels
Societies & activities
Recognition
Awards
100% Merit Scholarship
Awarded for A-Levels
4th Place Globally — NSS International Space Settlement Contest
Out of 1600+ international teams.
1st Place (Gold Medal) — International Kangaroo Linguistics Contest
Gold Medal among 3000+ competitors worldwide.
Silver Medal — International Youth Mathematical Championship (IYMC)
Among 12,500+ participants across 98 countries.
Bronze Medal — International Astronomy Astrophysicists Contest
Among 4700+ students.
Honorable Mention (Top 30) — CERN Beamline for Schools (BL4S)
Only Pakistani Team in Top 30 with Honorable Mention out of 1600+ international teams.
15th Globally — International Academic Marathon
15th globally in the Mathematics category.
Shortlisted — IOI & International Philosophy Olympiad
Shortlisted for the national teams in Informatics and Philosophy.
Dean's Honor List
Academic excellence award for years 2022–2025
Top 25 — Pakistan National Mathematics Talent Contest (NMTC)
HEC Pakistan.
Certifications
TOEFL iBT: 116/120
Patents & publications
Understanding or Imitation? Auditing Conceptual Understanding and Reasoning in Large Language Models
Large-scale reproduction and extension of Mancoridis et al. (ICML 2025); identifies four sources of methodological fragility and demonstrates that reasoning models reduce Potemkin rates.
Data Doping or True Intelligence? Evaluating the Transferability of Injected Knowledge in LLMs
Demonstrates that comprehension-intensive SFT tasks yield substantially higher knowledge retention than token-mapping tasks across 5 model families. Confirmed scaling laws for knowledge retention.
With Essa Jan, Moiz Ali, Fareed Zaffar, Yasir Zaki
Read itGovernance & advisory
Project Head, Social Outreach Program
Built an Excel-based Strategic Business Management simulation deployed to 500+ students at the LUMS Young Leaders Entrepreneurs Summit.
Impact
- Updated LES role with business simulation impact.
Research & Design Executive
Team lead for 6 students on Pakistan’s first student-made propellant rocket targeting 1 km altitude. Overseeing Avionics, Propellants, and Design subsystems.
Impact
- Updated SPADES R&D role with propellant rocket project.
Director Observatory
Revamped the LUMS observatory by repairing a Celestron 6SE AVX mount; organized 5+ interactive astronomy workshops.
Impact
- Updated SPADES Observatory role with repair and workshop details.
Founder
Established Pakistan’s first high school observatory; fundraised and led acquisition of telescopes valued at PKR 1.5 million.
Impact
- Added Nergis Mavalvala Astronomy Society role.
Founder & President
Founded and led the society from scratch; introduced LEGO and Arduino programs to 250+ students; coached teams to 12+ national competitions, winning 7+ contests.
Impact
- Updated ISL Robotics role with student count and win metrics.
Social impact & activities
Volunteer Teacher
Developed STEM curriculum; taught web development and Arduino to 60+ underprivileged female students.
Impact
- Outreach reached 2000+ students.
Lead Teacher & Project Coordinator
Developed a robotics curriculum for the Aga Khan Middle School Programme; taught 50+ students Arduino and LEGO EV3.
Core Team Member & Director IT
Fundraised for Trans Health Club with Project Pehchaan; led COVID-19 response reaching 400+ families.
Co-Lead, Climate Classrooms
Devised mobilization campaign with 11+ educational seminars; delivered Smog Action demands to Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate.
Fundamentals of Machine Learning
Designed and taught a curriculum covering supervised/unsupervised learning, neural networks, and practical ML applications to 100+ students.
What drives the work
Motivations
- Advancing AI safety through interpretability and robustness research.
- Bridging the gap between theoretical ML and production-quality systems.
- Mentoring the next generation of engineers and researchers.
Objectives
- Seeking global AI/ML research or engineering roles focusing on mechanistic interpretability, model robustness, and systems thinking.
Principles
- Empirical Rigor
- Systems Thinking
- Collaborative Research
- Educational Outreach
Muhammad's twin is AI, it can make mistakes.
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