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 research intersects with topics including natural language processing, (mechanistic) interpretability, cognitive science, distribution-shift robustness, causal machine learning, synthetic data, multimodal representation learning, and computational social science. I like to describe my primary area of study as “cognitive neuropsychology of AI” – where cognitive scientists like psychologists or neuroscientists study how intelligent systems like the human mind/brain learn, represent, and process information, I am focused on performing similar analysis with respect to foundation models like LLMs.

These are my recent publications.

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I am a member of Cheng Zhai’s TIMAN research group and Julia Hockenmaier’s hmr-lab 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.