Shuyu Wu

Shuyu Wu

he/him

First year PhD student at the University of Waterloo

Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Conference Papers

The Mechanistic Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Language Models

Published in Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning, 2026

This paper is about whether and how symbol grounding emerge in (multimodel) language models.

Recommended citation: Shuyu Wu, Ziqiao Ma, Xiaoxi Luo, Yidong Huang, Josue Torres-Fonseca, Freda Shi, Joyce Chai. "The Mechanistic Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Language Models. 2026." Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 306:136502-136521, 2026.
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From Behavioral Performance to Internal Competence: Interpreting Vision-Language Models with VLM-Lens

Published in Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, 2025

We introduce VLM-Lens, a toolkit designed to enable systematic benchmarking, analysis, and interpretation of vision-language models (VLMs) by supporting the extraction of intermediate outputs from any layer during the forward pass of open-source VLMs.

Recommended citation: Hala Sheta, Eric Haoran Huang, Shuyu Wu, Ilia Alenabi, Jiajun Hong, Ryker Lin, Ruoxi Ning, Daniel Wei, Jialin Yang, Jiawei Zhou, Ziqiao Ma, and Freda Shi. 2025. "From Behavioral Performance to Internal Competence: Interpreting Vision-Language Models with VLM-Lens." In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 886–895, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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