Hi! I am Sunny :)

I’m an undergraduate student majoring in Symbolic Systems and a coterminal student in Computer Science at Stanford University. I am very fortunate to be advised by Dan Jurafsky and Robert Hawkins.

I am interested in the intersection between cognitive science and AI, specifically using insights about human cognition to build safe and more robust and interpretable AI systems that can benefit our long-term development. My research agenda involves better understanding LLMs and their behaviors and aligning them in ways that can bring about positive societal impacts.

Outside of research, here are some things that I love: good books (modernist, feminist, sci-fi, satirical), black tea, running, hiking (with four limbs when it’s really steep), tennis and badminton, and Avalon. One of my biggest dreams is to write an autobiographical fiction.

Recent Papers

Generation Space Size: Understanding and Calibrating Open-Endedness of LLM Generations. Sunny Yu, Ahmad Jabbar, Robert Hawkins, Dan Jurafsky, Myra Cheng. Pre-print, under review (2025).

ELEPHANT: Measuring And Understanding Social Sycophancy in LLMs. Myra Cheng*, Sunny Yu*, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Lujain Ibrahim, Dan Jurafsky. Pre-print, under review (2025).

Generics Revisited: Analyzing Generalizations in Children’s Books and Caregivers’ Speech. Sunny Yu, Alvin Tan, Siying Zhang, Phllip Miao, Riley Carlson, Tobias Gerstenberg, David Rose. The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2025).