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My name is Shuaizhi Cheng. I am 20 and I study artificial intelligence at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. My first-author paper was accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 main conference as a poster (https://neurips.cc/virtual/2026/loc/sydney/poster/149824), and the conference is in Sydney this December. The paper is called The Override Gap: A Magnitude Account of Knowledge Conflict Failure in Hypernetwork-Based Instant LLM Adaptation. It is about why new information sometimes cannot override what a language model already knows.
NeurIPS is paying for my registration and for my accommodation from December 6 to 13. I submitted my visa application on November 13; a friend paid the fee (AUD 250) for me and I need to give it back. What I still cannot pay for is the flight. The ticket is already about 8,000 RMB, and in one or two weeks it will only be more expensive. I have no income of my own and my family cannot support me on this.
I love AI research. This chance is very important to me and I really want to go.
The direct goal is to present the paper and to talk with other people at the conference. I will be at my poster for the whole session to explain the work myself.
What I care about most is meeting more people, because this is very important for my future career. My interests are interpretability and knowledge editing, and I also think about philosophical questions on AI and human agency. I am still an undergraduate and I am looking for people to work with and a place where I can keep doing research. During the week I want to find them, ask what they are working on, and ask if there is a way for me to work with them.
I arrive in Sydney and present the poster in person. As the first author I have to be there.
I meet possible collaborators, mentors and research groups, and I stay in contact with them after the conference
I post a short update here when I am back
Return economy flight from China to Sydney (about $1,400 to $1,600, not booked yet)
Food and local transport in Sydney from December 6 to 13 (about $400)
The visa fee my friend paid for me (AUD 250, about $170)
$1,800 is the minimum: the flight, if I can still get the lower price, and food and transport. With $2,200 I can also give the money back to my friend, who was kind to help me, and I am safe if the ticket gets more expensive.
It is only me. I am the first author of The Override Gap (https://neurips.cc/virtual/2026/loc/sydney/poster/149824).
My other interpretability work includes Swapped, Not Used, where I intervene on a model's intermediate representations to test whether the model really uses the information in them when it reasons. I also studied how a model's persona changes through repeated self-distillation.
I contribute to open-source tools: TransformerLens and SAELens (fixes for activation hooks and parameter initialisation), Hindsight (memory update and retrieval) and the OpenAI Node SDK (streaming).
I also write philosophy. I started reading it in high school and I did not stop. Two manuscripts are public, Persona Without Substrate and Apokalypse-Blindheit Reread; they are about identity in language models and about human responsibility as technology develops.
Website: https://parafee.me
The most likely cause is that I cannot get the money for the flight in time. December is close and the price is going up. The other one is the visa: I applied on November 13 and I am still waiting for the result.
If I cannot go, I will not present my own paper and I will not meet anyone there. The paper is accepted and the accommodation is arranged, so I really do not want this to happen because of a plane ticket. If the trip is cancelled I will update this page and work with Manifund to return the unused money.
NeurIPS covers my registration and accommodation, and a friend paid my visa fee. I applied to Compound's Reverie Grants and to Inflection Grants, and I asked Jump Trading about travel support. None of them has replied. G-Research rejected my application. I do not have much hope for the ones that are left.
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