Michael Hahn

Michael Hahn is a Tenure-Track Professor (W2) at Saarland University's Saarland Informatics Campus, directing the Language, Computation, and Cognition Lab (LaCoCo). He holds dual affiliations with the Department of Language Science and Technology and the Department of Computer Science. Hahn earned his PhD from Stanford University in 2022, advised by Judith Degen and Dan Jurafsky.

Education:

• PhD in Computational Linguistics, Stanford University (2022)

Research Interests:

His work bridges machine learning and cognitive science, focusing on information processing in machines and the brain. Key areas include understanding transformer architectures, computational cognition, and the theoretical foundations of neural networks. He investigates how models like GPT-2 simulate human cognitive limitations, explores biases in perception, and develops methods for mechanistic interpretability.

Recent Achievements:

• Best Paper Award at ACL 2024 for 'Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?'
• Outstanding Area Chair at EMNLP 2024
• Recipient of the Second Prize at ICML 2024's Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop

Lab & Collaborations:

The LaCoCo Lab focuses on advancing theoretical and applied research in NLP and machine learning, with recent work on chain-of-thought reasoning limits, state space models, and evolutionary pressures in word order.