dicksonb [at] iu [dot] edu
Hi, I’m a PhD candidate in computer science at Indiana University working with Zoran Tiganj.
I’m interested in:
- attention, memory, long-context modeling
- big huge gigantic distributed llm training methodology, optimizers, model architecture, efficient training, pre-training
- human / ai alignment
Sacred Texts:
Before my PhD, I did an MS in computational linguistics at IU, and before that, I did a BA at Michigan State University where I studied linguistics, CS, TESOL, Chinese, and Korean, and did a summer language program at Harbin Institute of Technology. While at MSU, I had a brief stint playing competitive CSGO, and when I was younger, I played football, baseball, and tennis, and had a short career in chess where I took first place in my regional elementary school chess tournament and retired.
Selected Research:
Loss Scaling and Long-Context Retrieval Across Attention Variants
Billy Dickson, Zoran Tiganj
Workshop on Methods and Opportunities at Small Scale @ COLM
2026
[paper]
Gradual Forgetting: Logarithmic Compression for Extending Transformer Context Windows
Billy Dickson, Zoran Tiganj
First Workshop on CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models @ NeurIPS
2025
[paper]
Time-Local Transformer
Billy Dickson, James Mochizuki-Freeman, Md Rysul Kabir, Zoran Tiganj
Computational Brain & Behavior
2025
[paper]
Vision-language models learn the geometry of human perceptual space
Craig Sanders, Billy Dickson, Sahaj Singh Maini, Robert Nosofsky, Zoran Tiganj
Preprint arXiv:2510.20859
2025
[paper]
Comparing Perceptual Judgments in Large Multimodal Models and Humans
Billy Dickson*, Sahaj Singh Maini*, Craig Sanders, Robert Nosofsky, Zoran Tiganj
Behavior Research Methods
2025
[paper]
More Interests:
- formula 1, racket sports, indycar, card games, weightlifting, football
Teaching:
Fall 2025, Assistant Instructor, Applied Machine Learning (Indiana University)
Summer 2024, Generative AI and Symbolic Knowledge Representations: Large Language Models, Knowledge, and Reasoning (ESSLLI 2024, Leuven, Belgium)
Spring 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Assistant Instructor, Data Mining (Indiana University)
Spring 2020, Adult Communicative Focused English (Michigan State University)
Education:
PhD, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Indiana University, ~2027
MS, Computer Science, Indiana University, 2025
MS, Computational Linguistics, Indiana University, 2022
BA, Linguistics, Michigan State University, 2020