David Bau

· Professor of the Practice, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Affiliate Appointment

Northeastern University · Artificial Intelligence and Data Science

Active 1994–2026

h-index31

Citations13.0k

Papers12574 last 5y

Funding—

Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.

Faculty page

See your match with David Bau — sign in to PhdFit.Sign in

About

David Bau is an assistant professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. His research focuses on human-computer interaction and machine learning. Before joining Northeastern, he worked as a software engineer at Google, BEA, and Crossgain. Bau has been published in numerous journals and conferences, including CVPR, NeurIPS, ICCV, ECCV, and SIGGRAPH. Outside of research, he enjoys astronomy and puzzle collecting.

Research topics

Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Programming language
Natural Language Processing
Psychology
Econometrics
Cognitive psychology
Computer vision

Selected publications

Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT
arXiv (Cornell University) · 2022 · 174 citations
We analyze the storage and recall of factual associations in autoregressive transformer language models, finding evidence that these associations correspond to localized, directly-editable computations. We first develop a causal intervention for identifying neuron activations that are decisive in a model's factual predictions. This reveals a distinct set of steps in middle-layer feed-forward modules that mediate factual predictions while processing subject tokens. To test our hypothesis that the…
DOI
Concept Sliders: LoRA Adaptors for Precise Control in Diffusion Models
Lecture notes in computer science · 2024-11-09 · 27 citations
book-chapterSenior author
Publisher DOI
Customizing Text-to-Image Models with a Single Image Pair
2024-12-03 · 17 citations
articleOpen access
Publisher OA PDF DOI
Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability
ArXiv.org · 2025-01-27 · 5 citations
preprintOpen access
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the computational mechanisms underlying neural networks' capabilities in order to accomplish concrete scientific and engineering goals. Progress in this field thus promises to provide greater assurance over AI system behavior and shed light on exciting scientific questions about the nature of intelligence. Despite recent progress toward these goals, there are many open problems in the field that require solutions before many scientific and practica…
Publisher OA PDF DOI
Leveraging AI for Productive and Trustworthy HPC Software: Challenges and Research Directions
Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-11-23 · 1 citations
book-chapterOpen access
Publisher OA PDF DOI

Frequent coauthors

Antonio Torralba
48 shared
Jun-Yan Zhu
25 shared
Bolei Zhou
19 shared
Gary Hachfeld
16 shared
Robert Holcomb
University of Rochester
16 shared
William J. Craig
University of Edinburgh
16 shared
Joanna Materzyńska
13 shared
Hendrik Strobelt
12 shared

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2016
M.S., Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2012
B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2011

Similar researchers at Northeastern University

Resume-aware match score
Save to shortlist
AI-drafted outreach

See your match with David Bau

PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.

Free to start
No credit card
30-second signup