Postdoc position on AI alignment and safe AI available at EPFL DLAB

EPFL, l’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, is one of the most dynamic university campuses in Europe and ranks among the top 20 worldwide in many academic rankings. EPFL has more than 6,500 staff members who bring the school's three main missions to life: education, research, and innovation.

Mission

Research topics:

• Alignment
• Large language models
• Natural language processing
• Mechanistic interpretability

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position at EPFL, to be hosted by the Data Science & AI Lab, headed by Prof. Robert West.

We seek a candidate who will lead ground-breaking research projects with the goal of building safe AI that truly cares about human interests.

Instead of viewing alignment as mere postprocessing of pretrained models, you will contribute to our agenda of raising models that will be continuously aligned throughout the training process, starting from token 1 in pretraining. To this end, you will combine synthetic data generation, mechanistic interpretability, LLM pre- and posttraining, and model evaluation in novel ways.

Principales tâches et responsabilités

• You will contribute to the Swiss AI Initiative, in particular by incorporating your research results into Apertus, SwissAI’s open, transparent, multilingual language model.
• You will work in a stimulating, open, and international research environment consisting of many highly talented and motivated students, embedded in a strong network of academic and industrial collaborators.
• Project work with MS and PhD candidates is expected.

Profil

• Candidates should have completed, or be near completion of, a PhD with a strong international publication record in AI or NLP. Strong programming skills and experience with machine learning frameworks are required.

Nous offrons

• A stimulating and international working environment.
• Competitive salary and excellent working conditions.
• Opportunity to perform state-of-the-art research in one of the most dynamic scientific institutions in Europe.
• Opportunity to interact with internationally renowned experts, and with a strong team of postdoctoral researchers and PhD candidates.

Informations

Only applications submitted through the online platform are considered. You are asked to supply:

• A brief cover letter (pdf, up to 2 pages).
• A CV with a publication list.
• A research statement (pdf, up to 3 pages).
• Contact details for 3 referees.

For any further information, please contact: candice.norhadian@epfl.ch

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