PhD position in representation learning for NLP at Idiap (Switzerland)

[James Henderson]

Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for a PhD student position in deep learning for natural language, focusing on structured representation learning in LLMs.  This researcher will work with Dr. James Henderson in the Natural Language Understanding group.

Idiap offers competitive salaries, a beautiful location, and a world-class AI research community.  PhD students are registered at EPFL.  This researcher will investigate representation learning for language, as part of a Swiss NSF project building on our recent Bayesian extensions of transformer embeddings in LLMs.  Our nonparametric variational information bottleneck induces more abstract and interpretable attention-based representations, which we will leverage and extend to investigate how LLMs can induce and process graph-structured representations.

The ideal PhD candidate should hold a Masters degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, or related fields. She or he should have a background in machine learning, and experience in natural language processing would be a plus. The applicant should also have strong mathematical and programming skills.

Please apply on the Idiap careers site.  All questions related to these positions should be sent to Dr. James Henderson (james.h...@idiap.ch).  Applications received by 5 January 2026 will be given full consideration.

Sincerely,
  - James Henderson
    james.h...@idiap.ch