about me

Hello there! 👋 My name is Adam Davies, and I’m a CS PhD candidate in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at UIUC.

My research vision is to help build the foundations of a cognitive science of AI, studying how foundation models like LLMs learn, represent, and process information. My work focuses on how we can interpret and control the features learned and leveraged by these models, including how they are used in performing various tasks, and how to apply such knowledge/methods to predict and improve models’ generalization to novel contexts. My current research intersects primarily with NLP, (mechanistic) interpretability, cognitive science, OOD generalization, and causal machine learning; but I also have ongoing collaborations in the areas of synthetic data, multimodal representation learning, computational social science, and AI for education.

where’s Adam?

I’m co-advised by Professors ChengXiang Zhai and Julia Hockenmaier at UIUC, and I work as a research assistant with the INVITE institute. I also collaborate frequently with the Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford, and recently (in Summer 2025) completed a research internship with the Neurocompositional AI team in the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research.