Sepp Hochreiter

Sepp Hochreiter is University Professor (Univ.-Prof.) at the Institute for Machine Learning, Johannes Kepler University Linz, and heads the LIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. He is Principal Investigator of several major Austrian and EU projects, including the FWF Cluster of Excellence “Bilateral Artificial Intelligence” and industry collaborations on certified deep learning, generative CFD simulation, and quantum-AI integration.

Research interests revolve around the foundations and applications of deep learning:

• Recurrent neural networks: Inventor of LSTM; recent work on the xLSTM family that scales to billion-parameter language models while outperforming Transformers in efficiency.
• Uncertainty & reliability: New uncertainty estimation techniques for language generation, conformal prediction, and out-of-distribution detection using modern Hopfield networks.
• Generative models: Discrete diffusion samplers, generative drug-design pipelines (Bio-xLSTM), masked-image-model refiners, and physics-informed neural samplers.
• Applied AI: Few-shot learning in robotics, traffic prediction, medical risk modeling, antibody design, and climate downscaling.

His 2022-2025 publications reveal a clear trend toward scaling recurrent architectures (xLSTM, FlashRNN, pLSTM) with hardware-aware optimisation, bridging theory and practice through energy-based models, and deploying trustworthy AI in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and autonomous systems.

Scientific recognition & service:

• Keynote & invited speaker at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and leading industry venues (60+ invited talks since 2022).
• Principal Investigator on 61 funded projects totalling >€50 M, spanning FWF, FFG, EU Horizon, and direct industry contracts.
• Editorial board and senior programme committee roles for top-tier ML conferences and journals.

Supervision & team leadership: Leads a vibrant lab of 30+ PhD students and post-docs across machine learning theory, generative modelling, and AI for science. Active in joint doctoral training programmes with IST Austria and international partner labs.