PhD/Postdoc Positions on LLM Theory, Interpretability, and Safety

The Language, Computation, and Cognition Lab (LaCoCo) 
<https://lacoco-lab.github.io/home/> at Saarland Informatics Campus 
<https://saarland-informatics-campus.de/en/> (Saarbrücken, Germany), 
directed by Michael Hahn <https://mhahn.info/>, invites applications for 
fully funded PhD and postdoc positions, with a flexible start date.

*
RESEARCH AREAS
*
We’re especially excited about projects on:

  * Mathematical foundations of large language models (LLMs), e.g.,
    computational complexity, learning theory
  * New architectures and efficient reasoning for LLMs
  * Mechanistic interpretability
  * Theoretical foundations for AI safety

You’ll have substantial freedom to shape your topic within the lab’s scope.

Some representative publications from the past 3 years:

  *
    Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers? (ACL 2024,
    https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.800/)
  *
    InversionView: A General-Purpose Method for Reading Information from
    Neural Activations (NeurIPS 2024,
    https://openreview.net/forum?id=clDGHpx2la)
  *
    Contextualize-then-Aggregate: Circuits for In-Context Learning in
    Gemma-2 2B (COLM 2025, https://openreview.net/forum?id=rGNAyHReSg)
  *
    Discovering Interpretable Algorithms by Decompiling Transformers to
    RASP (ICML 2026, https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08857)
  *
    On the Ability of Transformers to Verify Plans (ICML 2026,
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.19954)



*ABOUT THE LAB*

Our research has been awarded an Emmy Noether grant (DFG), the Heinz 
Maier-Leibnitz Preis (DFG), and paper awards at ACL 2024 and Mechanistic 
Interpretability Workshop 2024. We regularly publish at top venues 
(e.g., 11 NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR papers over the past year).

Learn more about the lab at https://lacoco-lab.github.io/ 
<https://lacoco-lab.github.io/><https://lacoco-lab.github.io/>


*HOW TO APPLY
*
Please follow the procedure here: https://lacoco-lab.github.io/joining/ 
<https://lacoco-lab.github.io/joining/><https://lacoco-lab.github.io/joining/>

For questions, please contact Michael Hahn at [email protected]

--
Michael Hahn
Tenure-Track Professor
Saarland Informatics Campus
Saarland University
Group: https://lacoco-lab.github.io/
Personal: https://www.mhahn.info/

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