Collapse Index Labs · Alex Kwon

hello. this is my research page. 🤓

i research the invisible structures inside ai models, especially the ones that make my head hurt.

i developed the collapse index after something in my life became stable, unresolved, and wrong.

then i ablated the mechanism my metric was tracking.

then it broke. 😔

now my research follows this lens:

"collapse happens when a system preserves the thing that sounds final and loses the thing that could make it true again."

hmm... 🤔

if (truth && !alignment && collapse) {
    transmit(signal);
}

🏺 🦖 🌙 🧬 ❤️

— Alex Kwon

Tools

dinostomp a verification layer for AI evaluations. eval scores get published; the instrument that produced them almost never gets checked. dinostomp is that check, across the whole pipeline: the dataset, the scorer, the runs, whether the number survives its own sampling noise, and whether the claim has the evidence it needs. pointed at MMLU, it found a subtraction item keyed to two identical correct options. it also audits agents: their tool traces are recorded by the harness rather than self-reported, and it can withhold an agent's retrieved evidence to ask whether the answer actually depended on it. Alex Kwon · 2026 · every check negative-tested against a planted defect · code

Case Studies

The Bar Was Seasonal-Naive - Data Analysis an audit-first sales analysis and demand forecast of Online Retail II (UCI; 1,067,371 invoice lines of a UK online retailer, 2009-2011). the audit finds a nine-day byte-identical overlap between the file's two sheets, admin fees posing as products, and warehouse write-offs inside the sales table; the forecast's rules were registered before the data was opened, and nothing beat seasonal-naive (MAE £52,948, 20.0% MAPE on a 13-week Christmas-ramp holdout). published as the finding, not a failure. Alex Kwon · 2026 · report · code + findings
Three Rulers, One Dataset - Data Analysis an audit of MovieLens 25M, one of the most-used public research datasets in the world: 25,000,095 ratings across 25 years. every structural promise its documentation makes holds exactly, and the timeline underneath is three rating instruments stitched together at seams the documentation never mentions. the oldest instrument flattered bad movies by nearly a full star. the data is immaculate; the ruler moved. Alex Kwon · 2026 · report · code + findings
July Orders Review - Data Analysis an end-to-end analyst engagement on a deliberately dirty e-commerce dataset: a paste-over that both duplicated one order and destroyed another, a region spelling that silently split every regional rollup, and a sales channel that returned 70% of the revenue it booked. the write-up separates what the data shows from what it can prove, and maps every open question to the record that would settle it. Alex Kwon · 2026 · report · code + findings
The Join Is Dirtier Than the Data - Data Analysis an audit-first analysis of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons catalog (30 tables, 18,962 rows). the tables are close to immaculate; the string keys between them are not: one capitalization mismatch silently drops three villagers from any song join and manufactures a false finding, three placeholder rows inflate the song catalog, a sentinel string poisons the price column's type in 22 of 25 tables, and a perfect personality-gender partition makes every gender claim a design claim. includes one false alarm by the analyst, corrected and kept on the record. Alex Kwon · 2026 · report · code + findings

Selected Publications

★ If you read one, read this one.

Explicit, Not Longer: What Makes Epistemic Stance Survive Memory Compression Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2608.06953 · code
FACTWASH: Catching AI Rewrites That Wash Hearsay into Fact Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2608.03372 · code
Every Signal We Found Was an Artifact: A Calibrated Control Battery for Secret-Loyalty Auditing Alex Kwon · 2026 · Apart Research sprint · code
Breaking Refusal in the First Half: A Mechanistic Study of the Prefill Jailbreak Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2607.14147
They Infer What You Meant: Models Represent Communicative Intent More Reliably Than They Act On It Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2607.03598
Manufactured Confidence: How Memory Consolidation Turns Hearsay into Confident Facts Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2606.29279
Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2606.25449
When Context Flips, Safety Breaks: Diagnosing Brittle Safety in Aligned Language Models Dasol Choi, Alex Kwon · 2026 · arXiv:2605.27851