about me

Hi! My name is Adam Davies, and I’m a CS PhD student 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.

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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.

I was a doctoral research assistant with the NCSA from August 2021 through July 2022, and with Professor Heng Ji from August 2022 through July 2023. I graduated cum laude from the University of Utah in Spring 2021 with B.S. degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science, for which I was advised by Professors Ellen Riloff and Dustin Stokes (respectively).