Elif Akata

Elif Akata

PhD 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 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.

I'll be based in New York over the summer and fall, interning at Meta FAIR. Feel free to get in touch by email or drop me a message on X or LinkedIn if you'd like to have a chat!

News

July 2026Two invited talks: at CiNet Monthly Seminar, hosted by the Center for Information and Neural Networks in Osaka, and at the Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society.
July 2026Started as a Research Scientist Intern at FAIR @ Meta, NYC!
June 2026Gave an invited talk at the UCLA Trustworthy AI Lab.
May 2026Presented "In-Context Function Learning in LLMs" at AISTATS in Tangier.
February 2026Invited talk at the Human Information Processing Lab at Oxford.
January 2026Joined the University of Oxford, FLAIR as a visiting researcher.
November 2025Gave a guest lecture at the Hertie School in Berlin.
August 2025Presented at the CCN conference in Amsterdam.
July 2025"A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition" is out in Nature.
June 2025Paper accepted to ICML 2025.
May 2025"Playing repeated games with large language models" is published in Nature Human Behaviour.
January 2025"Visual Cognition in Multimodal Large Language Models" is published on Nature Machine Intelligence and was on the cover.
August 2024Attended the MIT Brains, Minds & Machines Summer School in Woods Hole, MA.
June 2024Invited talk at the Generative AI in Social Science Research Workshop at the London School of Economics.
June 2024Invited talk in the Experimental Psychology Department at University College London.
July 2023Attended 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

Nature Machine Intelligence 2025

Visual cognition in multimodal large language models

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

Paper

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

ICML 2025

Testing the Limits of Fine-Tuning for Improving Visual Cognition in Vision Language Models

Luca M Schulze Buschoff*, Konstantinos Voudouris*, Elif Akata, Matthias Bethge, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Eric Schulz

Paper

AISTATS 2026

In-Context Function Learning in Large Language Models

Elif Akata*, Konstantinos Voudouris*, Vincent Fortuin, Eric Schulz

Paper

Experience

July 2026—Present

Research Scientist Intern — Meta FAIR

Multi-Agent Multimodal Foundations

Jan 2026—June 2026

Visiting Researcher — University of Oxford

British Open-Ended Learning & Discovery Lab

Oct 2021—Sep 2022

Research Assistant — Tübingen AI Center

Computational Neuroscience & ML

Sep 2020—Nov 2020

Research Intern — Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Haptic Intelligence

May 2017—Apr 2019

Student Research Assistant — Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Programming Languages & Verification

Education

Oct 2022—Present

Helmholtz Munich & University of Tübingen

PhD in Machine Learning

Oct 2019—Feb 2022

University of Tübingen

MSc in Computer Science

Oct 2015—Sep 2019

Saarland University

BSc in Computer Science