Zachary Shinnick

Machine Learning Researcher and Engineer

I am an MPhil student at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), where I am supervised by Professor Anton van den Hengel. I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide. I am currently a visiting researcher at the Torr Vision Group, University of Oxford, with Professor Philip Torr.

Previously, I worked as a software engineering intern at Google, ByteDance, and IMC Trading, contributing to projects in large-scale distributed systems, fitness wearables, mobile development, and electromagnetic propagation modelling.

Outside of research and engineering, I am passionate about running and surfing.

News & Updates

[Jul 2026] Attended ICML 2026 in Seoul, Korea. Presented "Procedural Pretraining: Warming Up Language Models with Abstract Data" as an oral and a poster.
[Jun 2026] Released TypewriterLM.
[Jun 2026] New preprint released: "Pretraining Language Models on Historical Text."
[Jun 2026] Presented "Can You Learn to See Without Images?" at CVPR 2026 in Denver, Colorado.
[Jun 2026] "Procedural Pretraining: Warming Up Language Models with Abstract Data" selected as an oral at ICML 2026.
[May 2026] Ran a 39:06 10km PB at the Oxford Town and Gown.
[Apr 2026] "Procedural Pretraining: Warming Up Language Models with Abstract Data" accepted as a spotlight paper at ICML 2026.
[Apr 2026] Started a visiting researcher placement at Torr Vision Group, University of Oxford, with Professor Philip Torr.
[Mar 2026] Gave a talk on "Procedural Pretraining: Warming Up Language Models with Abstract Data" at the ELLIS Reading Group.
[Mar 2026] Gave a talk on Procedural Pretraining at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.
[Feb 2026] "Can You Learn to See Without Images?" accepted to CVPR 2026.
[Jan 2026] New preprint released: "Procedural Pretraining: Warming Up Language Models with Abstract Data."
[Dec 2025] Completed the Victor Harbour Half Marathon with a new PB of 1:32:55.
[Nov 2025] New preprint released: "Can You Learn to See Without Images? Procedural Warm-Up for Vision Transformers."
[Sep 2025] Completed the City To Bay Half Marathon.
[May 2025] Attended ICML 2025 in Vancouver. Presented a poster for "Transformers Pretrained on Procedural Data Contain Modular Structures for Algorithmic Reasoning."
[Apr 2025] Completed the London TCS Marathon.
[Feb 2025] Began MPhil in Machine Learning at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML).
[Nov 2024] Awarded a Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship ($120k) for machine learning research.
[Nov 2024] Completed Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (Advanced), University of Adelaide.
[Nov 2024] Began internship at IMC Trading.
[Oct 2024] Visited the MIT Media Lab in Boston.
[Aug 2024] Completed the Adelaide Half Marathon.
[Feb 2024] Began internships at ByteDance and the MIT Media Lab.
[Nov 2023] Began internship at Google.
[Oct 2023] Elected President of the University of Adelaide Competitive Programming Club.
[Oct 2023] Completed the Melbourne Marathon.
[Jun 2023] Started summer exchange at University College London (UCL).
[May 2023] Completed the Barossa Half Marathon.
[Nov 2022] Awarded a Summer Research Scholarship to conduct computer vision research at AIML.
[Oct 2022] Elected Vice President of the University of Adelaide Competitive Programming Club.
[Feb 2022] Started Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of Adelaide and wrote my first line of code.

Work Experience

Software Engineering Intern

IMC Trading

Nov 2024 - Jan 2025

Worked on electromagnetic propagation modelling on the Network Engineering Team.

Research Intern

MIT Media Lab

Feb 2024 - Jun 2024

Conducted research on safety and alignment in large language models, working on critical problems at the intersection of AI capabilities and responsible AI development.