Two Foundational Artificial Intelligence CDT students awarded places on the Turing Enrichment Scheme

Two CDT PhD students have been awarded the prestigious Alan Turing Scholarship, named after the pioneering British mathematician. The scholarship is given annually to outstanding students making innovative contributions to AI research

Hossein A. (Saeed) Rahmani's 

Hossein's research interests are centred around natural language processing and information retrieval. His PhD research is particularly focused on the evaluation of large language models (LLMs), exploring the dynamic roles these models play as both evaluators and evaluatees. This dual perspective is critical for advancing the understanding and development of LLMs, as it addresses both their capabilities and limitations in various context.
LLMs like ChatGPT are advanced machine learning systems trained on vast, diverse datasets to perform a wide range of tasks. These models have shown impressive performance on new tasks by simply following given instructions, known as "prompts." However, current evaluation methods have limitations that hinder our understanding of their capabilities, particularly in self-evaluation scenarios. Saeed's research aims to develop new methods for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs, enabling researchers in academia and industry to make informed decisions about the safety and utility of these models. Saeed will focus on benchmarking these models and identifying the limitations introduced when the same LLM is used as both the evaluator and the evaluatee.
Lorenz Wolf 
Lorenz's research focuses on efficient and robust Reinforcement Learning (from human feedback). As AI systems in the form of recommender systems and chatbots play an increasingly important role in our daily lives, ensuring the robustness of such systems is crucial. Specifically, in the context of Reinforcement Learning, which powers many AI applications, Lorenz's Turing-related research will investigate new methods to ensure robustness against corrupted rewards and reward model overoptimization.

The recipients will receive funding to continue their research and join the Turing Network, a collaborative platform for advancing AI research in the UK.

Congratulations to both Saeed and Lorenz for this outstanding achievement!

Further information on the Turing Enrichment Scheme can be found here

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