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Nicole Ma Hi! I'm an undergrad at Stanford studying CS. I'm interested in mechanistic interpretability, robotics, and their intersection. I've worked on robotics annotations, speculative decoding, and AI for knowledge workers @ NVIDIA, reasoning efficiency and hardware-aware ML @ SAIL, spatial reasoning and physical optimization @ Topological, and geophysical modeling @ NASA. |
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Research |
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How Do World Action Models Use Their Imagined Futures? Evidence from Mechanistic Interventions
Nicole H. Ma*, Harsh Singh* NeurIPS Robot Learning (Oral Spotlight) & Interp Workshops We use activation patching to reveal how robot policies use imagined futures for manipulation. Intervening on these representations redirects actions and reveals an attention pathway carrying their causal influence. |
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Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions
Nicole H. Ma*, Nick Rui* ICML Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, 2026 paper We investigate where and how representations of future tokens form in language models, and whether they causally guide generation. |
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Optimizing Remasking Schedules for Reasoning in Discrete Diffusion Models
Radostin Cholakov*, Zeyneb N. Kaya*, Nicole H. Ma* ICLR ReALM-GEN and NFAM Workshops, 2026 paper We learn adaptive remasking schedules that improve mathematical reasoning in discrete diffusion language models while reducing the number of denoising steps. |
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Ensemble Learning Approaches for Bias Correction in Offshore Wind Resource Assessment
Nicole H. Ma, Brian Colle AMS Annual Meeting, 2024 We use ensemble learning to correct biases in offshore wind estimates for wind resource assessment. |
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Multidirectional Stochastic Modeling of the North Atlantic Jet Stream
Nicole H. Ma NJSHS, 2023 We project latitudinal shifts in the North Atlantic jet stream using multidirectional stochastic modeling. |
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* Equal contribution |
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I am separately interested in Middle Eastern and North African history. |
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French Colonial Transformation of the Casbah of Algiers
Nicole H. Ma, Morgan Tufan paper We examine how French land policy, urban planning, and wartime militarization transformed the Casbah from Algiers' urban core into a marginalized indigenous quarter from 1830 to 1962. |
Awards1st Place @ Act-athon (Physical Intelligence & Actor Labs) 1st Place @ Mercor x Cognition x Etched Hackathon 1st Place @ Pear VC x Anthropic Hackathon 1st Place Scrapybara @ Treehacks |
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Design and source code from Jon Barron's website. |