Bereket Yimolal Tiruneh

EECS undergraduate at GIST · Undergraduate Research Intern, GIST Data Science Lab

I research test-time adaptation and self-correcting reasoning in AI models, using the ARC-AGI benchmark as my testbed. I work with Prof. Sundong Kim. I also build and ship full-stack AI products, like HabeshaSphere.

Research

An ARC-AGI-2 task never seen in pre-training: the test input, the correct answer, the full fine-tuning prediction that reproduces it, and the LoRA prediction that does not

Full Fine-Tuning vs. LoRA for Test-Time Training on ARC-AGI-2

Poster · 10th GIST Creative Convergence AX-Challenge, AI Research Internship track, 2026

The Tiny Recursive Model (TRM, 7M parameters) learns a separate embedding for every puzzle it is trained on, so it has never been tested on a task it has truly not seen. I pre-trained a TRM with the 120 ARC-AGI-2 evaluation tasks held out, then adapted it to those unseen tasks at test time, comparing full fine-tuning with LoRA.

4.07%pass@2 on held-out ARC-AGI-2 tasks
~70×lower training loss than LoRA
48A100 GPU-hours in the sweep

For reference, the original TRM scores 7.80%, but it saw these tasks during pre-training and was pre-trained 5× longer.

Code Poster

Iterative Self-Correction in Language Models

Undergraduate thesis · in progress

A confidence ("doubt") head that predicts whether a language model's answer is correct and decides when to revise it, scaling how much it revises to the model's uncertainty. ARC-AGI is the main testbed.

Projects

Composed Image Retrieval

Find a garment from a photo plus a text edit such as "make it sleeveless". CLIP fine-tuned with LoRA, a cross-attention combiner, and FAISS search over 52K images.

25.8% Recall@10 on FashionIQ

PyTorch · PEFT · FAISS · Gradio · team project

Code Colab

HabeshaSphere

A web platform of everyday tools for Ethiopian users: exchange rates, a salary and income-tax calculator, Ethiopian calendar converters and an invoice generator. I launched it and run it on my own.

~100–200 monthly users

React · Flask · Supabase · Vercel

Visit site

Tic-Tac-Toe Reinforcement Learning

Solves the game exactly as an MDP with value iteration, then learns it from scratch with self-play Q-learning and checks every move against the solution.

Optimal in all 4,520 positions

Python · reinforcement learning

Code

GPA Calculator

Semester and cumulative GPA on the 4.5, 4.3 and 4.0 scales, with pass/fail courses. It updates as you type and saves your courses in the browser.

Live web app

React · Vite · GitHub Actions

Live demo Code

Password Manager

A command-line password vault. The key is derived with scrypt, and the whole vault, including site names, is encrypted and authenticated, so a tampered file is rejected.

Tested security design

Python · cryptography

Code

Amharic Text-to-Speech

Type Amharic in Ge'ez script and hear it read aloud. A React frontend for a speech pipeline built in n8n.

Amharic speech in the browser

React · n8n

Code

Education

Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)

2023 – 2027 (expected)

B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science · Gwangju, South Korea

Relevant coursework: Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Mathematics for Machine Learning, Probability and Statistics, Linear Algebra, Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Database Systems, AI Foundations (in progress), Information Theory (in progress)

Experience

Undergraduate Research Intern, Data Science Lab, GIST

Dec 2025 – present

Advisor: Prof. Sundong Kim

Test-time training for small recursive reasoning models on ARC-AGI-2: built the adaptation and evaluation pipelines and ran experiments on local GPUs and cloud A100s.

Mentor, PIUM Mentorship

2024 – 2025

Mentored Korean high-school students through academic and career discussions in English.

Skills

ML / AI: PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, PEFT (LoRA), scikit-learn, NumPy, Pandas, FAISS
LLMs: Gemini API / Google GenAI SDK, structured outputs, prompt engineering, RAG
Development: Python, JavaScript, SQL, FastAPI, Flask, React, REST APIs, Gradio
Tools: Git and GitHub, Supabase, Vercel, Google Colab
Languages: Amharic (native), English (fluent), Korean (elementary)