A sleeping penguin
A mostly sane penguin

Rishikesh Mallagundla

Researcher at Mercity

I work on interpretability, model architectures, and reproducing papers from their text. I write up every experiment here, including the ones that failed.

Featured · Aug 2026 Why Whisper Says “Thank You” to White Noise Eleven speech recognisers on pure noise, then layer and neuron ablations inside Whisper. Larger models hallucinate more, the colour of the noise matters as much as the model, and one early-encoder neuron switches the behaviour off without hurting real speech. Read the write-up →