Elif Akata

Elif Akata

Ph.D. Student
Helmholtz Munich & University of Tübingen

CV
elif.akata@helmholtz-munich.de
Google Scholar
@elifakata
github.com/eliaka
linkedin.com/in/elifakata

I'm a PhD student working at the intersection of cognitive science and machine learning. My research focuses on understanding how LLMs behave as social, collaborative agents—and how we can design systems that effectively interact, adapt, and communicate in dynamic environments.

News

May 2025Our paper is now out in Nature Human Behaviour 🎲
January 2025Our paper was on the cover of Nature Machine Intelligence 🎉
January 2025Our paper on Visual Cognition in Multimodal Large Language Models was published on Nature Machine Intelligence 🚀
August 2024I attended the MIT Brains, Minds & Machines Summer School in Woods Hole, MA 🧠
June 2024I gave a talk at the Generative AI in Social Science Research Workshop at the London School of Economics 📢
June 2024I gave an invited talk in the Experimental Psychology Department at University College London 💭
July 2023I attended the International Computer Vision Summer School in Sicily 🏖

Publications

Playing repeated games with large language models

Nature Human Behaviour 2025

Playing repeated games with large language models

Elif Akata, Lion Schulz, Julian Coda-Forno, Seong Joon Oh, Matthias Bethge, Eric Schulz

PaperCode
Visual cognition in multimodal large language models

Nature Machine Intelligence 2025

Visual cognition in multimodal large language models

Luca M. Schulze Buschoff*, Elif Akata*, Matthias Bethge, Eric Schulz

PaperCode
Centaur: a foundation model of human cognition

arXiv 2024 (Under review)

Centaur: a foundation model of human cognition

Marcel Binz, Elif Akata, Matthias Bethge, Franziska Brändle, Fred Callaway, Julian Coda-Forno, Peter Dayan, Can Demircan, Maria K. Eckstein, Noémi Éltető et al.

PaperCode

Experience

Oct 2021-Sep 2022

Research Assistant — Tübingen AI Center

Advisor: Matthias Bethge

Computational Neuroscience and ML lab

Sep 2020-Nov 2020

Research Assistant — Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Advisor: Katherine Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence department

May 2017-Apr 2019

Student Research Assistant — Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Advisor: Eva Darulova

Programming Analysis and Verification group

Education

Oct 2022—Present

Helmholtz Munich & University of Tübingen

Ph.D. in Machine Learning

Advisor: Eric Schulz & Matthias Bethge

Oct 2019—Feb 2022

University of Tübingen

M.Sc. in Computer Science

Oct 2015—Sep 2019

Saarland University

B.Sc. in Computer Science