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Nicola Paoletti

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PhD Position in AI Safety, Robust Inference, and Counterfactual Causal Reasoning at King's College London King's College London in United Kingdom

Degree Level

PhD

Field of study

Computer Science

Funding

Funding is available through competitive faculty PhD scholarships and the King’s-China Scholarship Council (K-CSC) programme for eligible Chinese applicants. The post does not specify stipend amount or tuition coverage.

Deadline

Dec 1, 2026

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Country

United Kingdom

University

King's College London

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Keywords

Computer Science
Cognitive Science
Mathematics
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement Learning
Causal Inference
Formal Methods
Statistics
Large Language Models
ML

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About this position

Nicola Paoletti, Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, is looking for prospective PhD students to join the Department of Informatics. The planned start is October 2027.

The opening is centered on two broad research directions: Reliable and Robust Inference for AI Safety and Security, and Counterfactual Causal Reasoning for Sequential Decision-Making and AI Systems. The first project focuses on AI monitoring and decision-making with rigorous probabilistic guarantees under distribution shift, adversarial attacks, limited feedback, and evolving environments. Topics include conformal prediction, risk control, sequential and anytime-valid inference, latent monitoring of language models, adversarial robustness, and applications to safety monitoring, attack detection, routing, diagnosis, control, and verification.

The second project explores how counterfactual and causal reasoning can explain decisions and failures in sequential AI systems such as MDPs, POMDPs, and language-model agents. Possible directions include causal attribution and repair for LLM agents, symbolic abstractions of agent behaviour, latent-level causal explanations, counterfactual analysis of learned world models, and formal verification of counterfactual properties.

Funding is available through competitive faculty PhD scholarships and the King’s-China Scholarship Council (K-CSC) programme for eligible Chinese applicants. The main application deadline is December 2026, while K-CSC applicants may follow a different timeline.

Applicants with interests in artificial intelligence, machine learning, AI safety, conformal prediction, causal inference, counterfactuals, formal methods, reinforcement learning, and LLM agents are encouraged to get in touch early to discuss topic fit. The projects are broad and can be shaped around a candidate’s interests and background.

Funding details

Funding is available through competitive faculty PhD scholarships and the King’s-China Scholarship Council (K-CSC) programme for eligible Chinese applicants. The post does not specify stipend amount or tuition coverage.

What's required

Prospective PhD students with interests or background aligned to AI safety, robust inference, machine learning, causal inference, formal methods, reinforcement learning, or LLM agents are encouraged to apply. The post says the topic can be shaped around the candidate's interests and background. Eligible Chinese applicants may apply through the King’s-China Scholarship Council programme.

How to apply

Email Nicola Paoletti directly if you are interested, preferably sooner rather than later to discuss topic fit. Eligible Chinese applicants may also follow the K-CSC route on a different timeline. Review the attached project briefs and mention which project area interests you.

More information can be found here

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