about me

Hi! My name is Adam Davies, and I’m a CS PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign co-advised by Professor ChengXiang Zhai and Professor Julia Hockenmaier.

My primary research areas are natural language processing, (mechanistic) interpretability, distribution-shift robustness, causal machine learning, synthetic data, and multimodal representation learning. In particular, I am focused on interpretable analysis of semantic representation in large language models and multimodal vision-language models, studying how these models learn and represent the meaning in language and the visual world as compared to us humans. (For more details, see my research agenda.)

These are my recent publications.

---

I am a member of Prof. Zhai’s TIMAN research group and Julia Hockenmaier’s Natural Language research group at UIUC, and I work as a research assistant with the INVITE institute. I also have several recent and ongoing collaborations with the Torr Vision Group at Oxford.