Joey David

I'm a grad student researcher focusing on LLM reasoning and self-improvement, as well as Machine Learning in general. Aside from completing my M.Sc. in AI/ML at PSL University (under ENS, Mines and Dauphine), I'm currently working on semi-supervised learning with INSA Lyon (DISP Lab); and on reasoning methods in small LLMs independently.

Research

Temporal Predictors of Outcome in Reasoning Language Models

We probe just how early a Large Language Model (LLM) internally commits to an eventual outcome by training linear classifiers on hidden states after the first 𝑡 reasoning tokens; showing that eventual correctness is highly predictable after only a few tokens. We show that, for harder questions, a drop in predictive accuracy highlights a selection artifact: hard items are disproportionately represented in long CoTs.

ArXiv | GitHub
Semi-Supervised Pipeline for Etiological Diagnosis of Uveitis (Ongoing)

Semi-Supervised Pipeline for Etiological Diagnosis of Uveitis, building a data-efficient flow from patch-level embeddings to graph attention maps for ultra-wide-field fundus scans. The project combines MTSN contrastive training, One Vote Veto pseudo-labelling, and GACNN localisation with collaborators at INSA Lyon.

Private repository

Selected Projects

Agentica

Modular agentic framework for automation, learning, and research. Current agents include a research agent, an email assistant for categorization and others. Implementation of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) through dynamic agent generation and management for complex task execution.

GitHub | Demo
Heuristic Retrieval for Latent Reasoning

Latent-space guidance system for Meta's Coconut model, coupling latent reasoning tokens with a FAISS vector store to nudge reasoning traces in real-time. Currently integrating RL penalties to improve generalization on complex queries.

GitHub
GPT-2-mimic

Starting with a pure python/pytorch re-implementation of GPT-2 as described in the original OpenAI paper, this project was extended via QLoRA to allow fine-tuning on messages to try to replicate given personalities.

GitHub
C++ Optimized Neural Nets

This series reimplements feedforward networks in C++ and NumPy for handwriting recognition, music tagging, and more. Several optimizations (Dynamic tanH instead of LayerNorm for regularization, dropout, weight tying) improved the speed and performance of the C++ implementation to be far faster than their numpy counterparts.

GitHub
Soldering Defect Detection with PatchCore

A fine-tuned PatchCore pipeline that flags industrial soldering anomalies using anomalib's memory-bank k-NN scoring. I tuned thresholds and evaluation scripts so operators can catch rare defects without expanding labeling budgets.

GitHub

Timeline

Education

  • 2025-26 M.Sc. IASD (M2) - ENS Ulm, Mines ParisTech, Universite Paris-Dauphine (PSL).
  • 2024-25 M.Sc. CS (M1) - UCB Lyon 1.
  • 2020-24 B.Sc. CS - UCB Lyon 1; exchange student at Oregon State University (2023-24).

Experience

  • 2025 Graduate Student Researcher - INSA Lyon, DISP Laboratory; semi-supervised ML for medical imaging.
  • 2024 Software Engineering Intern - Sopra Steria; NLP workflows and full-stack delivery.

Misc.

ChatBrain

ChatBrain is a conversation analysis playground with a custom YOLO detector for chat interfaces and OCR transcription. It centralises multi-platform logs so I can study interaction patterns and interface ergonomics.

Live | GitHub
Playsorter

Playsorter reorganises Spotify playlists using Jaccard similarity and ranking heuristics to surface cohesive listening sessions. It runs entirely client-side so anyone can experiment with clustering without shipping data away.

Live | GitHub
py-scripts

py-scripts is a grab bag of Python utilities I rely on for automation and quick experiments. Expect everything from data wrangling helpers to small personal productivity hacks.

GitHub