Ming-Chang Chiu

I am a Founding Scientist at rekursiv.ai, currently focusing on ensuring our harness can be reliably deployed for discovery in Virtual Cell domain. Previously, I founded Carabin, an AI assurance startup building trust infrastructure for autonomous inter-agent interactions, and in my essay Trust at Machine Speed argued that well-intentioned agents can quietly diverge in what they believe they’ve agreed to, and that both commerce and science need a clearinghouse for the agent era. My academic work has the same instinct for surfacing failures that aggregate metrics hide: subgroup discrepancies in image classifiers that look accurate overall (ICCV 2023), color-contrast effects in machine-assisted skin disease detection (ICASSP 2024), and behavioral inconsistencies in vision-language models. More recently, AIDE (ICLR 2025) explored how multimodal models can agentically recruit domain experts to improve themselves. I was also a contributor to VideoPoet where Josh and Dan also worked on, so it is nice to be with them again!

I was also a Cornell Runway Postdoc and hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where I was advised by Xuezhe Ma and collaborated closely with Pin-Yu Chen at IBM Research. I have published at venues including ICLR, ICCV, AAAI, and ICASSP, review for ICML, NeurIPS, and ACL, and previously conducted research at Google Research, NVIDIA, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. I am passionate about ensuring AI systems can verify and collaborate safely at scale.

Outside of work I backpack, snowboard, hunt for vintage finds, and listen to both classical and rock.