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I'm trying to get to Sydney this December to present my first-author NeurIPS paper, The Override Gap. I'm 20 and study AI at Harbin Institute of Technology. The conference has covered my registration and accommodation, but I still need money for the flight and everyday expenses during the trip.
I don't have a steady income, and my family can't help with these costs. A friend lent me the visa fee so I could submit the application on November 13. The flight is the part I'm still stuck on. I'm asking for about US$2,200 to cover the remaining costs and repay that loan.
I want to present the paper myself and meet other researchers. Getting to talk with potential collaborators and mentors matters a lot to me at this stage. I'm trying to find a place to keep doing research. I'd like to use the week to learn what different groups are working on and whether I could work with them.
My interests are in interpretability and knowledge editing, and I also write philosophy. This is my first first-author paper at a conference like NeurIPS. I really want to be there.
The first thing is getting there and giving our poster presentation. I'm the first author and responsible for presenting the work.
I also want to come home with people to stay in touch with about research. I'll post a short update here after the conference.
The budget is roughly US$1,400–1,600 for a return economy flight, US$400 for food and local transport from December 6 to 13, and US$170 to repay the AUD 250 visa fee.
At US$1,800, I could cover the flight and essentials if I can still find a fare at the lower end. At US$2,200, I could also repay my friend and handle a more expensive ticket. The flights I've found are already around RMB 8,000. I'd like to book soon.
The Override Gap studies why a language model can keep using its old knowledge even after adaptation gives it new information. My other work includes Swapped, Not Used, which tests whether information in a model's intermediate representations actually affects its reasoning. I've also studied persona changes through repeated self-distillation.
I contribute to open-source software, including TransformerLens, SAELens, Hindsight and the OpenAI Node SDK.
I started reading philosophy in high school, and it stayed with me. My public manuscripts Persona Without Substrate and Apokalypse-Blindheit Reread discuss identity in language models and human responsibility as technology develops.
NeurIPS paper:
https://neurips.cc/virtual/2026/loc/sydney/poster/149824
My research and projects:
https://parafee.me
The two things I'm waiting on are the money for the flight and my visa decision. It would be very hard to miss the conference after getting the paper accepted and arranging the accommodation.
If I can't travel, I'll update this page and work with Manifund to return the unused funds.
NeurIPS has covered registration and accommodation. The visa fee was a loan from a friend.
I also applied to Compound's Reverie Grants and Inflection Grants, and contacted Jump Trading about travel support. I'm still waiting for replies. G-Research turned me down. With December so close, I've been feeling pretty discouraged about finding the rest of the money.
If another source contributes toward the trip, I'll update the amount requested here.