I am currently a Research Assistant under Prof. Zhijing Jin at the University of Toronto and a Project Collaborator at the Vector Institute. My recent research focuses on improving AI safety, adversarial robustness and multi-agent systems, with the broader goal of developing socially beneficial and reliable AI systems. Outside of research, I enjoy playing the piano and exploring nature.

Education

• B.A.S.c in Computer Engineering
  University of Toronto, 2024 - 2029 (Expected)

Publications

• Objective Matters: Fine-Tuning Objectives Shape Safety, Robustness, and Persona Drift
  Daniel Vennemeyer, Punya Syon Pandey, Phan Anh Duong, Michael Umeokoli, Samuel Ratnam
  Pre-print, 2026 (Under Review)

• Quriosity: Analyzing Human Questioning Behavior and Causal Inquiry through Curiosity-Driven Queries
  Roberto Ceraolo, Dmitrii Kharlapenko, Ahmad Khan, Amélie Reymond, Punya Syon Pandey, Rada Mihalcea, Bernhard Schölkopf, Mrinmaya Sachan, Zhijing Jin
  AACL-IJCNLP Findings 2025

• CauSciBench: Evaluating LLM Causal Reasoning For Scientific Research
  Sawal Acharya, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Andrew Kim, Anahita Haghighat, Xianlin Sun, Pepijn Cobben, Rahul Babu Shrestha, Maximilian Mordig, Jacob T Emmerson, Yahang Qi, Punya Syon Pandey, Mrinmaya Sachan, Yinya Huang, Bernhard Schölkopf, Zhijing Jin
  Pre-print, 2025

• SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests
  Punya Syon Pandey, Hai Son Le, Devansh Bhardwaj, Rada Mihalcea, Zhijing Jin
  ICLR 2026

• CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures
  Punya Syon Pandey, Yongjin Yang, Jiarui Liu, Zhijing Jin
  EACL 2026

• Accidental Vulnerability: Factors in Fine-Tuning that Shift Model Safeguards
  Punya Syon Pandey, Samuel Simko, Kellin Pelrine, Zhijing Jin
  IASEAI 2026

Academic Services

• Reviewer
  NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Multi-Turn Interactions in Large Language Models (MTI-LLM)

• Reviewer
  ACL ARR 2025 (Feb, May)

• Committees
  Student Member - ACL Ethics Committee