HI, I'M VÉSTEINN

I’m an ELLIS PhD student at the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence working on natural language processing and computer vision. My advisors are Serge Belongie at the University of Copenhagen and Ryan Cotterell at ETH Zürich.

Currently I am working on algorithmically converting language models, robust tokenization, causally evaluating language models learnability, the role of contrastive decoding for synthetic data, cross-modal alignment and transfer learning for contrastive vision-language models. If you would like to discuss these topics, or others, feel free to send me an email.

Links

• A fairly recent CV.
• You can find me on Github.
• My published work is visible on Google Scholar.
• Some models and datasets are available on Hugging face.
• If you are wondering how to pronounce my name, then this gets very close.

News

• 2025/06 - Presenting work on transfer learning for CLIP models at SCIA '25 in my hometown Reykjavík!
• 2025/02 - Taxonomy-Aware Evaluation of Vision-Language Models accepted to CVPR '25.
• 2025/01 - Counterfactual Generation from Language Models accepted to ICLR '25.
• 2024/10 - I am giving an invited talk at Languages and AI in the Nordic Countries - for all? in Trondheim on the 6th of November.
• 2024/09 - LoQT: Low Rank Adapters for Quantized Training accepted to NeurIPS'24.
• 2024/09 - Activation Scaling for Attribution and Intervention in Language Models accepted to EMNLP'24 (findings).
• 2024/08 - Moved to Zurich to spend a year at ETH with Rycolab.
• 2024/07 - LoQT won the best paper award at WANT@ICML'24!
• 2024/06 - LoQT: Low Rank Adapters for Quantized Training will be presented as an oral at WANT@ICML'24.
• 2024/06 - Taking part in the Nordic Probabilistic AI School.
• 2024/06 - Attended a workshop on using the ALPS supercomputer.
• 2024/05 - Context versus Prior Knowledge in Language Models accepted to the main proceedings of ACL'24.
• 2024/04 - Gave a talk on evaluating vision-and-language models for classification at the Visipedia Workshop 2024
• 2024/04 - Ice and Fire: Dataset on Sentiment, Emotions, Toxicity, Sarcasm, Hate speech, Sympathy and More in Icelandic accepted to TRAC'24, congrats Steinunn Rut!
• 2024/02 - From Coarse to Fine-Grained Open-Set Recognition accepted to CVPR'24, congrats Nico Lang!
• 2023/12 - Attended the kick off for a Swiss AI Inititiative multimodal foundation model project in Lausanne.
• 2023/11 - Attended the kick off for TrustLLM in Linköping!
• 2023/10 - Assessing Neural Network Robustness via Adverserial Pivotal Tuning accepted to WACV '24 (oral)!
• 2023/09 - Attended GenU 2023.
• 2023/07 - Discriminative Class Tokens for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models accepted to ICCV '23!
• 2023/05 - Spent a week in Zurich visiting Rycolab
• 2023/05 - Gave an invited opening talk at the University of Iceland Science and Innvation Award
• 2023/05 - Byte-Level Grammatical Error Correction Using Synthetic and Curated Corpora accepted to the Proceedings of ACL'23 (oral).
• 2023/04 - Small-scale geohazards cause significant and highly variable impacts on emotions preprint is out on NHESSD.
• 2023/03 - Transfer to a Low-Resource Language via Close Relatives: The Case Study on Faroese accepted to NoDaLiDa in the very apt Faroe Islands!
• 2023/03 - Happy to have contributed to the Icelandic capabilites of GPT-4!
• 2023/03 - New website that only uses HTML and CSS
• 2023/01 - Attended MLSS 2023 in South Africa
• 2023/01 - Thesis examiner for Þór Sverrisson's MS thesis on abstractive summarization in Icelandic, congrats to Þór!
• 2022/12 - Now running a Mastodon instance at ellis.social
• 2022/10 - Attended MLOPS 2022 in Copenhagen at DTU
• 2022/09 - I started my PhD at the University of Copenhagen as an ELLIS student!

Contact