About Me
I am a fourth year PhD student at MIT EECS, where I am grateful to be under the guidance of Professor Nir Shavit as a member of the Shavit Lab. Prior to my graduate studies, I received my BA in computer science and in neuroscience from Columbia University, where I conducted research at the Peter Sims Lab.
I am curious about how computation arises on the scale of individual or small groups of neurons in both biological and artificial neural networks. I approach these questions through connectomics and mechanistic interpretability, with the goal of informing more efficient machine learning systems.
My research is supported by an IBM AI Research Grant.
News
- October 2025: I served as the primary author of a proposal selected for an IBM AI Research Grant to support my PhD research in the Shavit Lab.
 - June 2025: My work Input differentiation via negative computation was accepted into ICML 2025 Workshop HiLD
 - May 2025: My work A connectomics-driven analysis reveals novel characterization of border regions in mouse visual cortex was accepted for publication in the journal Neural Networks
 - March 2025: I gave a talk on my work Wasserstein distances, neuronal entanglement, and sparsity at Red Hat in Cambridge
 - January 2025: My work Wasserstein distances, neuronal entanglement, and sparsity was accepted into ICLR 2025 as a Spotlight Presentation
 - October 2024: I was selected as a Cerebras Research Fellow
 - May 2024: I received my SM from MIT EECS on Sparse Expansion and neuronal disentanglement
 - April 2024: I received an Honorable Mention from the NSF GFRP
 
Selected Works
Negative pre-activations differentiate syntax
Preprint on arXiv, 2025
Linghao Kong, Angelina Ning, Micah Adler, & Nir N. Shavit
 Download Paper
Input differentiation via negative computation
Presented at ICML 2025 Workshop HiLD
Linghao Kong*, Angelina Ning*, & Nir N. Shavit
 Download Paper
A connectomics-driven analysis reveals novel characterization of border regions in mouse visual cortex
Published in Neural Networks, 2025
Neehal Tumma*, Linghao Kong*†, Shashata Sawmya, Tony T. Wang, & Nir N. Shavit†
 Download Paper | bioRxiv
Wasserstein distances, neuronal entanglement, and sparsity
Published in ICLR 2025 as a Spotlight Presentation
Shashata Sawmya*, Linghao Kong*, Ilia Markov, Dan Alistarh, & Nir N. Shavit
 Download Paper | arXiv
