Max Torop

I am a PhD candidate in Prof. Jennifer Dy’s lab at Northeastern. I work on interpretable ML, with a focus on understanding and steering latent representations in LLMs. I also collaborate with scientists at MSKCC on ML for dermatology. I was a research intern at Apple during Summer 2024, working on methods for selecting SFT/RLHF training data for LLMs. I will be interning in the ML Research Team at Morgan Stanley this upcoming summer.

Previously, I completed an MS in CS at WUSTL, where I developed deep learning methods for MRI data in Prof. Ulugbek Kamilov’s Computational Imaging Group. I received a BS in Data Science from the University of Rochester in 2018.

Outside of research I love to watch anime and read. Some favorites are One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist, Dororo, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Stormlight Archive, Never Let Me Go, East of Eden and Hyperion.

News

Oct 19, 2026	Recognized as a top reviewer for NeurIPS 2026!
Sep 24, 2026	Our work Inverted Detection and Control in Steering Vectors has been accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
Jun 1, 2026	Started internship in the Machine Learning Research Team at Morgan Stanley.
Dec 10, 2025	The Northeastern College of Engineering has published an article on my background and recent research!
Oct 17, 2025	Received a Top Reviewer Award for NeurIPS 2025.

Selected Publications

2025

DISCO: Disentangled Communication Steering for Large Language Models

Max Torop, Aria Masoomi, Masih Eskandar, and 1 more author

In The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025

arXiv Code

Axiomatic Explainer Globalness via Optimal Transport

Davin Hill, Joshua Bone, Aria Masoomi, and 2 more authors

In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2025

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{hill2025axiomatic,
  title = {Axiomatic Explainer Globalness via Optimal Transport},
  author = {Hill, Davin and Bone, Joshua and Masoomi, Aria and Torop, Max and Dy, Jennifer},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = {1351--1359},
  year = {2025},
  organization = {PMLR},
}

2024

Boundary-Aware Uncertainty for Feature Attribution Explainers

Davin Hill, Aria Masoomi, Max Torop, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 02–04 may 2024

arXiv Bib Code Poster

@inproceedings{pmlr-v238-hill24a,
  title = { Boundary-Aware Uncertainty for Feature Attribution Explainers },
  author = {Hill, Davin and Masoomi, Aria and Torop, Max and Ghimire, Sandesh and Dy, Jennifer},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = {55--63},
  year = {2024},
  editor = {Dasgupta, Sanjoy and Mandt, Stephan and Li, Yingzhen},
  volume = {238},
  series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = {02--04 May},
  publisher = {PMLR},
}

2023

SmoothHess: ReLU Network Feature Interactions via Stein’s Lemma

Max Torop, Aria Masoomi, Davin Hill, and 3 more authors

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 02–04 may 2023

arXiv Bib Code Poster

@inproceedings{NEURIPS2023_9ef5e965,
  author = {Torop, Max and Masoomi, Aria and Hill, Davin and Kose, Kivanc and Ioannidis, Stratis and Dy, Jennifer},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  editor = {Oh, A. and Naumann, T. and Globerson, A. and Saenko, K. and Hardt, M. and Levine, S.},
  pages = {50697--50729},
  publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
  title = {SmoothHess: ReLU Network Feature Interactions via Stein\textquotesingle s Lemma},
  volume = {36},
  year = {2023},
}

2020

Deep learning using a biophysical model for robust and accelerated reconstruction of quantitative, artifact-free and denoised images

Max Torop, Satya VVN Kothapalli, Yu Sun, and 4 more authors

Magnetic resonance in medicine, 02–04 may 2020

arXiv Bib Code

@article{torop2020deep,
  title = {Deep learning using a biophysical model for robust and accelerated reconstruction of quantitative, artifact-free and denoised images},
  author = {Torop, Max and Kothapalli, Satya VVN and Sun, Yu and Liu, Jiaming and Kahali, Sayan and Yablonskiy, Dmitriy A and Kamilov, Ulugbek S},
  journal = {Magnetic resonance in medicine},
  volume = {84},
  number = {6},
  pages = {2932--2942},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Wiley Online Library},
}