Short bio
I am an M.Sc. student in Computer Science at the University of Milan, where I am writing my thesis on concept erasure in large language models with Elisabetta Rocchetti and Prof. Alfio Ferrara at ISLab. I received my B.Sc. in Computer Science from the same university in 2024, graduating 110/110 cum laude, and I am currently a teaching assistant for the first-year Python course of the Bachelor’s in Artificial Intelligence.
Looking for a PhD
I am looking for PhD positions, pre-doctoral fellowships and lab collaborations starting in 2026/2027. If your group works on mechanistic interpretability, representation geometry or AI safety, I would be glad to talk.
Research interests
I work on AI safety, mainly through mechanistic interpretability and representation engineering. I study the geometry of representations: how concepts such as truth and refusal are encoded in a model’s activation space, and whether interventions built on that picture, like steering and concept erasure, change only what they are meant to change.
Looking ahead, I want to study social LLMs and agent behaviour: how models act when they interact with people and with each other.
Manuscripts
- Ongoing: What Does Forgetting Look Like? Where activations land after concept erasure
Ilyass Ouardi, with Elisabetta Rocchetti and Alfio Ferrara. M.Sc. thesis, expected 2027. - The Multidimensional Geometry of Truth in Large Language Models: A Concept-Cone Extension of the Linear Representation Hypothesis
Ilyass Ouardi. Preprint (draft), 2026. - What Does a Heart Sound Classifier Actually Learn? A Controlled Comparison of Cepstral, Spectral and Wavelet-Packet Representations
Ilyass Ouardi. Preprint (draft), 2026. - The Legend Challenge: Embedding Ethical Compliance into LLMs through Champion Narratives
Fatmir Bylyshi*, Hicham El-Khazri*, Ilyass Ouardi*. Preprint (draft), 2026. *Equal contribution.
More on the Research page.
News
- I will be at the Swiss AI Safety Days in Zurich (7–8 November). Happy to meet if you are there.
- Started as teaching assistant for Computer Programming (Python), the first-year course of the inter-university Bachelor's in Artificial Intelligence (Pavia, Milan, Milano-Bicocca), with Prof. Stefano Ferrari.
- Joined team steer-fry with Enrico Bottazzi in the Steerability Challenge.
- Started my M.Sc. thesis on concept erasure in LLMs with Elisabetta Rocchetti and Prof. Alfio Ferrara at ISLab.
- Joined AI Safety for Italy (AIS4I), the Italian AI safety community, as a member and organizer.
- Started as teaching assistant for Accertamento delle Competenze Informatiche at the University of Milan.
- Joined Lead the Future, a STEM mentorship community, as a mentee.
Outside research
I have played football since I was a kid, from the streets up to semi-pro, and basketball is how I switch off after a long day of studying.