Dhia Naouali

Dhia naouali

Final-year SWE student  (integrated undergrad/Master's)

Research interests: representation learning and vision, modeling and understanding emergent structure in learned representations (SSL, diffusion, ...), with broader interest in world models and RL.

self-tought from papers, talks, blogs and repos

Looking for a thesis research internship starting around February(preferred) - April 2027

News

Sep-2026. Serving as a reviewer for a NeurIPS'26 workshop.
Aug-2026. "VLCP: Vision Language Control Policy Closed-Loop Code Replanning for Robot Manipulation" [arXiv]
 D. Naouali, M. Wu, C. Wong, A. Puthran, O. G. Younis , accepted @ EMR Workshop, ECCV'26.
Jul-2026. Presented "Perceptually Controversial Latents" as a poster at EEML'26 summer school.
Mar-2026. Ranked 4th in the ICLR'26 Re-Align Challenge; solution presented as a poster. [blog]
Nov-2025. Ranked 13th (top 1.1%) in the NeurIPS'25 EEG Foundations Challenge as team return_sota.

Blogs & technical notes

Modeling the World

April-2026
This blog surveys the world modeling landscape: visual representation and latent imagination, inference-time planning and emerging directions in latent geometry, hierarchy and 3D structure.

World Models & VLAs

February-2026 (minimal)
Notes on world models and VLAs: learning in latent dreams, JEPA architectures, foundation vision models for model-predictive control, and physical consistency constraints

A Decade of Residuals: History & Effects on modern ML

January-2026
This blog traces the evolution of residual connections and their influence on modern architectures, optimization dynamics, learned representations and the emergence of gating and hyper-connection mechanisms.

Learning Reinforcement Learning

December-2026 (in progress)
Notes on modern deep RL: policy gradients, actor–critic methods, Q-learning, exploration and practical training insights mainly from UC Berkley's CS285 Deep RL course.

A Gentle Introduction to Distributed Training

November-2025
In this blog post we discuss distributed training by examining how parallelism strategies shard and schedule data, parameters and intermediate activations to control memory usage and execution flow.

JAX: Jit Autograd XLA

October-2025
In-depth reference on JAX: design and programming philosophy, distributed / multi-device training, async dispatch via XLA and high-performance usage patterns.

Mechanistic Interpretability

August-2025
An overview of techniques for reverse-engineering features, circuits, and representations in vision models using probing, disentanglement, and adversarial analysis.

Generative Adversarial Networks

July-2025
A concise exploration of how GANs work focusing on training schemes, architectures, objectives and the Generator-Discriminator dynamics.

Transformers as a flock of tokens

April-2025
This blog post breaks down transformers into alternating phases of token-to-token communication and representation-space transformation, viewing tokens as a flock evolving across layers.

A Representation Space Interpretation of Neural Networks

March-2025
This blog post offers a geometric reframing of neural networks, describing how successive layers sculpt and reorganize the data manifold in representation space.