Welcome to my web page.

I’m Ali Cy, an MEng doing machine learning at MIT, advised by Kaiming He. In undergrad, I also did research under Vincent Sitzmann and Amir Zamir.

I am interested in understanding unsupervised, emergent intelligence that has developed from scratch. Such intelligences surround us in daily life: human intelligence, animal intelligence, and perhaps even plant intelligence. More than the details of how they work, I want to understand the necessary, general conditions under which they may develop.

I am working in unsupervised vision and visual reasoning. An aspirational interest of mine is learning through interactions with an environment (evolution/alife, reinforcement learning, etc.)

Please reach me at califyn@mit.edu.

[CV] [Last updated: Dec. ’25]

publications

ARC Is a Vision Problem!   2025
Keya Hu, Ali Cy, Linlu Qiu, Xiaoman Delores Ding, Runqian Wang, Yeyin Eva Zhu, Jacob Andreas, Kaiming He [code]

Studying Phase Transitions in Contrastive Learning   ICLR 2023 Physics4ML Workshop
Ali Cy, Anugrah Chemparathy, Michael Han, Rumen Dangovski, Peter Y. Lu, Marin Soljacic [code]