Liu Yuchen

Independent AI researcher based in Hong Kong. Sophomore at HKUST, EE + AI dual major. Personal site & CV: lyrica.xn--7xa.monster

Current work. Four papers under double-blind review at NeurIPS 2026 (three sole-author, one co-first), all on mechanistic interpretability and methodology for vision-language-action models.

Φ(fight) Research

Founder of Φ(fight) Research, a brand-new independent research collective for physical-world AI fighting. Co-founder: Han Muchen (HKUST).

• Principles: anti-VC · non-dilutive funding only · open publication only · zero founder salary

• Site: xn--7xa.monster

• GitHub: github.com/phi-monster

• HuggingFace: huggingface.co/phi-monster

• Legal: Phi Fight Research LLC (Wyoming), filed 2026-05-16, pending Secretary of State approval

2026–2027 research program. Three papers targeting ICLR 2027 (submission September 2026):

1. Φ-Arena — the first open benchmark for VLA-vs-VLA adversarial evaluation across MuJoCo, Isaac Sim, and Genesis.

2. Mechanistic interpretability of self-play policies — circuit-level analysis of exploit-prone subnetworks emerging under adversarial training.

3. Energy-bounded adversarial games — empirical study of how hard physical resource constraints reshape emergent self-play strategies..