Vlad Niculae of the Language Technology Lab (LTL) has received a VIDI grant of €850,000 for his research proposal entitled ‘RECONSTRUCT: Making AI Language Model Reasoning Controllable and Structured’.

RECONSTRUCT: Making AI Language Model Reasoning Controllable and Structured

Large language models, the face of today’s AI, employ textual reasoning when tackling complex tasks: they can produce a transcription of “thinking” leading up to the answer. Their failures are tied to “overthinking”, as the unstructured chain of thought grows long, chaotic, and even disconnected from the output. For this reason, experts cannot trust and integrate AI into high-stakes processes. Niculae’s project will build trustworthy language models that reason in a structured form, creating a compact and hierarchical plan, no larger than needed, drawing inspiration from concept maps and other forms of expert organised note-taking.

VIDI grant

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Vidi grants to 10 talented researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Amsterdam UMC (AMC location). The Vidi funding amounts to a maximum of €850,000 per project. This will allow the researchers to develop their own research line and establish or further expand their own research groups.

Read the NWO news item about all of the awards