Dylan Jayabahu — AI researcher, CS at Waterloo.

Dylan Jayabahu

CS @ Waterloo · AI research · Previously Shopify

1.000
same points, opposite reading

Research highlights

COLM 2026 Workshop on Efficient Reasoning · Spotlight

The Halt Vector

24% less thinking at held accuracy across five unseen benchmarks, without RL.

All research

01 The Truth Was Never Gone: Perfect Aliasing in Compliant-Context Truth Probes Interpretability · Truth ProbesSole author

Below-chance truth-probe scores need not mean a model has hidden truth information. In the compliant-context setup studied here, truth and action training labels coincide: fitting either probe solves the same optimization. On adversarial evaluation data, scoring that direction against opposite labels forces complementary AUROCs. Mixed-context fitting separates the two targets.

0.006
Conventional probe · AUROC
1.000
Identified probe · same activations
751
Cell-layer pairs · identity exact
The same 751 (cell, layer) pairs, twice. On compliant data the truth and action AUROCs are one fitted direction scored against opposite labels: every pair sits on action = 1 − truth, to one machine epsilon. On mixed contexts the collinearity breaks and the identity is gone. Measured, across 39 cells.

The aliasing rate then follows in closed form from two published behavioural rates and no activations at all, released as a 40-line audit function. The constructive half is a randomized-codebook task plus mixed-context fitting: on identical activations of a Gemma-2-9B policy lying on 100% of adversarial trials, the conventional probe reads 0.006 while the identified probe reads 1.000 with zero seed variance, holding at the final layer in 19 of 21 cells across four architectures (3B to 32B). Scoped to linear decodability, not causal use.

02 Internalizing the Halt Vector: What a Halt Target Changes in a Reasoning Model Interpretability · Efficient ReasoningFirst author, with Tinuade Adeleke

On Qwen-7B, the halt target shortened thinking more than random, reversed and covariance controls, and about as much as a nearby progress-tracking direction. On-axis training cut held-out thinking by 14.0% overall (shorter on MATH at lower Math-Verify accuracy, longer on GSM8K, relative to the untrained model); full-vector training shortened about as much, with more boxed answers and higher Math-Verify accuracy. Removing text loss shortened GSM8K thinking by 37.4 percentage points. A no-text-loss variant, chosen after that result, cut thinking by 34.3–45.6% on MATH500, AIME and GPQA-Diamond; correct boxed answers fell on MATH500 and GPQA-Diamond, largely through output format on GPQA-Diamond, while AIME accuracy remains unresolved. Projection-out tests leave halt-specific reliance unresolved; transfer beyond Qwen-7B is not established.

14.0%
Pooled shortening · MATH / GSM8K
37.4 pp
GSM8K effect of removing text loss
3
Benchmarks · no-text-loss variant
Historical activation geometry. On-axis movement and off-axis drift for the displayed training recipes. This descriptive comparison does not establish why objectives differ, that reconstruction is necessary, or how independently selected candidates perform. The plot does not compare candidates selected for matched shortening. The shaded separation is not a mathematical exclusion region. No displayed arm leaves the base model’s natural off-axis range.

Math-Verify credits answers anywhere in the output. The no-text-loss variant was tested once under pre-stated rules; on MATH500 its Math-Verify result was non-inferior within a fixed 3.85-point margin, while correct boxed answers fell. On GPQA-Diamond, fewer correct boxed answers arose largely through output format; AIME accuracy remains unresolved. In the projection-out test, removing the halt direction lengthened thinking, but removing other directions with matched components did much the same.

03 The Halt Vector: Internalizing a Causal Steering Intervention for Efficient Reasoning COLM 2026 Workshop on Efficient ReasoningFirst author, with Tinuade Adeleke · Spotlight

A reasoning model reaches its answer roughly twice as early as it stops writing. Found a causal “halt vector” in the residual stream and internalized it into the weights: a hook-free, per-problem self-halt that cuts overthinking without losing accuracy.

24%
Less thinking, held accuracy
0.70
Adaptivity (cut vs. slack)
5
Unseen benchmarks

Difference-of-means halt vector at layer 18 of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B. Steering it controls generation length monotonically (ρ = −0.82) where a replicated value axis is inert (+0.09). Internalized by reconstructing the full steered activation with the off-axis dimensions pinned; the scalar-projection target backfires, running 43% longer at 0.57 accuracy. Fit from 24 problems, no RL; stable across 3 seeds; closes an AIME cap-loop pathology (31–38% → 6–9%). The later Qwen-7B study examines what activation-target training installs, including effects of the text loss and the limits of projection-out tests.

04 Watching a Reward Hack Form InterpretabilitySole author · UWaterloo, 2026

Dense LoRA checkpointing turns a single GRPO run into a frame-by-frame movie of a 7B reasoning model's internals, so a failure mode can be studied as it forms, not just post-hoc.

3
Seeds reproduced
168
Bit-identical baseline cases
1×H200
Single-GPU pipeline

GRPO/RLVR + dense LoRA checkpointing + per-step probing. Under a length penalty, reasoning length collapses and held-out accuracy falls — a known effect, reproduced across three historical seeds. A literature review and two self-audits retired the original headlines; what survives is descriptive: in two of three seeds a first-answer-token concentration readout ended at 0.81–0.85 while accuracy fell 43–45%, so high readout concentration did not assure correct answers. The current paper asks how GRPO’s std and length normalizations jointly change the penalty’s accuracy cost; the std effect alone is already published. That four-arm factorial is implemented and pre-registered but not yet run; the pipeline has been calibrated on cloud H200s with a 50-step baseline run. Its fixed 500-question cohort replaces the historical seed-dependent splits; the two sets of evaluations must not be pooled.

05 Deep Learning Model for Invasive Ductal Carcinoma Detection in Histopathology Images IEEE CCECE 2025Sole author · Vancouver, May 2025

A computer-aided diagnosis pipeline for invasive ductal carcinoma that pairs sliding-window heatmaps with a homogeneous-region oversampling technique, preserving biological structure while correcting class imbalance. Evaluated on a public histopathology benchmark.

89.06%
Balanced accuracy
86.68%
F1 score

Sliding-window heatmaps visualize the model’s patch-level predictions. Evaluated on the public dataset and indexed on IEEE Xplore.

06 A Real-World mmWave Radar Dataset for Human Action Detection JCVIS · CVIS 2024First author, with Parthipan Siva · UWaterloo, 2024

The first FMCW mmWave dataset captured in natural living environments rather than a lab setup, positioning privacy-preserving radar as a viable backbone for aging-in-place monitoring. CNN baselines establish where the real difficulty lies.

28
Residences
458
Sit-down events
454
Stand-up events

TI IWR6843AOP FMCW sensor · 3D point clouds · 3-layer CNN with sliding-window detection. Presented at CVIS 2024.

Experience

Shopify

ML Engineering Intern · May–Aug 2026

Reworked a ModernBERT support-triage classifier to score conversations sequentially. In offline trajectory evaluation, healthy-chat false alarms fell from 89% to 17% at approximately 90% escalation recall.

Trained on approximately 2.4 million conversation segments across eight H200s; investigated an offline-to-production evaluation gap and shipped a shadow deployment with single-flag rollback. Built occlusion and streaming attribution tools to inspect predictions.

Perpion

Embedded Systems & Software Engineering Intern · June–Sept 2025

Developed low-latency C++ services, reducing latency by 12% through memory management and cache alignment. Co-authored provisional patents for hardware-software co-design.

Chirp

AI Development & Research Intern · July–Sept 2024

Built C++/CUDA inference engines for human action detection on edge devices, achieving 8× throughput through quantization and architecture tuning.

Projects

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