Darin Tsui

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Hi there! My name is Darin. I’m a Ph.D. candidate and NSF GRFP fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying Electrical and Computer Engineering and Bioengineering. I previously received my BS degree at the University of California San Diego in Bioengineering.

I currently work with Dr. Amirali Aghazadeh in the AI ML & Information Group, where I develop scalable tools for generative models in the biosciences. I am currently supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My research focuses on:

  • Leveraging mechanistic interpretability frameworks, such as cross-layer transcoders and sparse autoencoders, for circuit discovery, protein design, and extracting biological mechanisms from protein language models.

  • Extracting higher-order interactions in models by developing algorithms at the intersection of signal processing, coding theory, and combinatorics.

  • Developing principled generative models for high-throughput cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), autoregressive protein generation, and variant effect prediction.

My background is highlighly interdisciplinary. I previously interned at Generate:Biomedicines to conduct research on protein structure prediction foundation models. I have also previously interned at Surgalign (acquired by Xtant Medical) validating medical imaging deep learning models.

Outside of research, I co-chair Bioengineering Day at Georgia Tech, which aims to highlight interdisciplinary research. Previously, I served as President of the IEEE student branch and helped found the IEEE EMBS chapter at UC San Diego.

News

Sep 01, 2026 I’m excited to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Global Challenges Project workshop biosecurity cohort focusing on AI safety, biological risk, and policy evaluation!
Jul 17, 2026 Excited to announce that we’ve been accepted into the Anthropic AI for Science program toward automating scientific discovery in protein language models!
Jul 08, 2026 ProGenMech has been accepted to the Mechanistic Interpretability workshop at ICML! ProGenMech adapts circuit tracing to autoregressive protein language models.
May 12, 2026 I’m happy to announce I’ve accepted an internship at Generate:Biomedicines this summer working at the intersection of protein structure and cryo-EM structure determination with Axel Levy and Max Baranov!
Apr 30, 2026 ProtoMech has been accepted to ICML! ProtoMech uncovers computational pathways in protein language models and brings us one step closer to understanding how they work.

Selected Publications

  1. ProtoMech.png
    Protein circuit tracing via cross-layer transcoders
    Darin Tsui, Kunal Talreja , Daniel Saeedi , and 1 more author
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , 2026
  2. ddpm.gif
    cryoSENSE: compressive sensing enables high-throughput microscopy with sparse and generative priors on the protein cryo-EM image manifold
    Zain Shabeeb , Daniel Saeedi , Darin Tsui, and 2 more authors
    In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) , 2026
  3. SHAPzero.png
    SHAP zero explains biological sequence models with near-zero marginal cost for future queries
    Darin Tsui, Aryan Musharaf , Yigit Efe Erginbas , and 2 more authors
    In Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) , 2025
  4. SpecMER.png
    SpecMER: Fast protein generation with K-mer guided speculative decoding
    Thomas Walton , Darin Tsui, Aryan Musharaf , and 1 more author
    In NeurIPS (Spotlight) , 2025