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.
News
- 2026/01Transducing Language Models accepted to ICLR 2026.
- 2026/01BRAGD: Constrained Multi-Label POS Tagging for Faroese accepted to LREC 2026.
- 2026/01Taking part in a CHI-FRO meetup at MIT giving a talk on Transduced Language Models.
- 2025/12Presenting our work on Transducing Language models at the Salon des Refusés EurIPS in Copenhagen.
- 2025/09Contrastive Decoding for Synthetic Data Generation in Low-Resource Language Modeling accepted to the BabyLM workshop at EMNLP.
- 2025/09Visiting the Computer Science department at the University of Iceland for the next year.
- 2025/08Presented work on Transducing Language Models at the Danish Digitalization, Data Science and AI conference.
- 2025/06Presenting work on transfer learning for CLIP models at SCIA '25 in Reykjavík!
- 2025/02Taxonomy-Aware Evaluation of Vision-Language Models accepted to CVPR '25.
- 2025/01Counterfactual Generation from Language Models accepted to ICLR '25.
- 2024/10Invited talk at Languages and AI in the Nordic Countries in Trondheim.
- 2024/09LoQT: Low Rank Adapters for Quantized Training accepted to NeurIPS'24.
- 2024/09Activation Scaling for Attribution and Intervention in Language Models accepted to EMNLP'24 (findings).
- 2024/08Moved to Zurich to spend a year at ETH with Rycolab.
- 2024/07LoQT won the best paper award at WANT@ICML'24!
- 2024/06LoQT presented as an oral at WANT@ICML'24.
- 2024/06Taking part in the Nordic Probabilistic AI School.
- 2024/06Attended a workshop on using the ALPS supercomputer.
- 2024/05Context versus Prior Knowledge in Language Models accepted to ACL'24.
- 2024/04Gave a talk on evaluating vision-and-language models at the Visipedia Workshop 2024.
- 2024/04Ice and Fire: Dataset on Sentiment, Emotions, Toxicity, Sarcasm, Hate speech, Sympathy and More in Icelandic accepted to TRAC'24, congrats Steinunn Rut!
- 2024/02From Coarse to Fine-Grained Open-Set Recognition accepted to CVPR'24, congrats Nico Lang!
- 2023/12Attended the kick off for a Swiss AI Initiative multimodal foundation model project in Lausanne.
- 2023/11Attended the kick off for TrustLLM in Linköping!
- 2023/10Assessing Neural Network Robustness via Adversarial Pivotal Tuning accepted to WACV '24 (oral)!
- 2023/09Attended GenU 2023.
- 2023/07Discriminative Class Tokens for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models accepted to ICCV '23!
- 2023/05Spent a week in Zurich visiting Rycolab.
- 2023/05Gave an invited opening talk at the University of Iceland Science and Innovation Award.
- 2023/05Byte-Level Grammatical Error Correction Using Synthetic and Curated Corpora accepted to ACL'23 (oral).
- 2023/04Small-scale geohazards cause significant and highly variable impacts on emotions preprint on NHESSD.
- 2023/03Transfer to a Low-Resource Language via Close Relatives: The Case Study on Faroese accepted to NoDaLiDa.
- 2023/03Happy to have contributed to the Icelandic capabilities of GPT-4!
- 2023/01Attended MLSS 2023 in South Africa.
- 2023/01Thesis examiner for Þór Sverrisson's MS thesis on abstractive summarization in Icelandic.
- 2022/12Now running a Mastodon instance at ellis.social.
- 2022/10Attended MLOPS 2022 in Copenhagen at DTU.
- 2022/09Started my PhD at the University of Copenhagen as an ELLIS student!
You can reach me at vesteinn.snaebjarnarson@gmail.com