Elisa Kreiss

Elisa Kreiss is recruiting a PhD student to join the UCLA Communication department and the UCLA NLP group at the University of California, Los Angeles. The research sits at the intersection of computational linguistics, natural language processing, multimodal machine learning, and cognitive science. The project explores how models learn from text and image data and how that learning gives rise to the behaviors observed in trained models. Possible research directions include studying how post-training stages affect cross-modal alignment, as well as how cognitive biases and preferences embedded in human-generated data shape what models learn and when those learned patterns become liabilities. The student will work in a research environment connecting UCLA Communication with the UCLA NLP group and will investigate model learning, human-centered NLP, multimodal data, and the relationship between human-generated information and model behavior. The opening is especially suited to applicants interested in understanding not only how well models perform, but also why they behave as they do. The advertised research emphasizes strong computational preparation alongside curiosity about the influence of human data on machine learning systems.