Elif Akata

PhD Student
Helmholtz Munich & University of Tübingen

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

I'm a final year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tübingen (where I am also an IMPRS-IS scholar) and the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI advised by Eric Schulz and Matthias Bethge.

My research lies in the intersection of cognitive science and machine learning. In particular, I'm interested in understanding how LLMs behave as social, collaborative agents and how we can design systems that effectively interact, adapt, and communicate in dynamic environments.

Prior to my PhD, I graduated from the University of Tübingen and Saarland University, with a MSc and BSc in Computer Science. In my free time, I like drawing, recently getting into digital art through designing journal covers, and playing most racquet sports, especially tennis.

News

February 2026I gave a talk at the Human Information Processing Lab at Oxford.

January 2026"In-Context Function Learning in LLMs" is accepted to AISTATS 2026.

January 2026I've joined the University of Oxford, FLAIR as a visiting researcher.

November 2025I was in Berlin to give a guest lecture at the Hertie School.

July 2025"A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition" is out in Nature.

June 2025Our paper has been accepted to ICML 2025.

May 2025"Playing repeated games with large language models" 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

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

Paper Code

Nature Machine Intelligence 2025

Visual cognition in multimodal large language models

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

Paper Code

Nature 2025

A foundation model to predict and capture 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.

Paper Code