Spark (Wen-Kwang) Tsao, Ph.D.

Senior AI Safety Research Lead & Architect AI Safety • Reinforcement Learning • Adversarial Robustness • Red Teaming

Researcher exploring AI safety through production systems and personal experiments. I build safety-critical ML systems by day and explore new ideas through prototypes and experiments.

📄 Published Research

First Author

• Mapping Smarter, Not Harder: A Test-Time Reinforcement Learning Agent That Improves Without Labels or Model Updates — EMNLP 2025 (Industrial Track) Novel RL agent achieving 93.94% accuracy and reducing expert review workload by 85% through test-time learning without retraining. arXiv:2510.14900

Team Lead / Last Author

• Primus: A Pioneering Collection of Open-Source Datasets for Cybersecurity LLM Training — 2025 Open-source cybersecurity dataset suite (pretraining, fine-tuning, reasoning distillation) yielding 15.9% improvement in aggregate benchmarks and 15.8% gain in CISSP certification.

Additional Publications

• Multi-Agent Reasoning with Large Language Models for Effective Corporate Planning — IEEE CSCI 2023

🏢 Professional Experience

Head of AI Lab @ Trend Micro (2008 – Present)

15+ years building safety-critical ML systems deployed globally. Founded and led AI Lab, delivering production AI safety systems from research to deployment:

• ML-based threat detection systems (2016)
• GenAI security copilot platforms (2023)
• Red-teaming pipelines and oversight systems at scale
• 20+ U.S. patents in AI-driven security systems

🏆 Recognition

• 20+ U.S. Patents in AI security and detection systems
• 418 citations (h-index 10) • Google Scholar
• EMNLP 2025 Industrial Track first-author publication

🧪 GitHub: Exploration Lab

This GitHub hosts my experiments and explorations—toys for learning, prototypes for testing ideas, and explorations in AI safety, RL, and adversarial testing.

Selected themes:

• LLM agent evaluation and reasoning systems
• Red-team simulations and adversarial robustness
• Reinforcement learning for scalable oversight

📫 Contact

Email: linhots.tsao@gmail.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/spark-tsao Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations