Michael A. Hedderich

I’m a Junior Research Group Leader (a German equivalent to assistant professor) at Munich University (LMU), affiliated with the MaiNLP group and the Munich Center for Machine Learning. I’m also a member of the ELLIS Society.

My research covers the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing and human-computer interaction studying how we can enable users to comprehensively explain, evaluate, understand and control the complex behavior of modern LLMs and GenAI models.

I’m both interested in developing new technology as well as building bridges from AI to other interested fields. To this end, my work includes technical and foundational methods, human-centered approaches, and applications in fields ranging from archaeology to medical research.

Here are more infos about my group and possibilities to join us. You can also check out our recent publications.

News

Nov 2025	Congratulations to Raoyuan for two accepted EMNLP Findings papers on cultural analysis and knowledge probing in LLMs, to Florian for an EMNLP Findings paper on discovering topic patterns in large text collections, and Jesujoba (from Saarland University) for an EMNLP main paper on charting the landscape of African NLP. Looking forward to EMNLP in Suzhuo 🇨🇳
Oct 2025	Back to my academic roots: I’ll visit the Saarland Informatics Campus for a talk at DFKI and some meetings mid October. If you also want to meet up, just let me know 🗓
Sep 2025	We are organizing a workshop of MCML and LAMARR (two German AI competency centers) on GenAI and NLP in Bonn 🔎
Jul 2025	I’ll visit Hamburg University mid July and also give a talk at their Data Science group ⚓️
May 2025	Congratulations to Florian for getting his first ACL paper accepted on probing multilingual discourse generalization 🎉 We will also present our Spotlight approach for LLM evaluation in Vienna 🇦🇹

More news

Affiliations

My affiliations are .

	Munich University (LMU), Germany, affiliated with the MainNLP group lead by Barbara Plank.
	Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), one of the six German AI Competence Centers.

In the past, I had the pleasure to work at

	Cornell University, USA, as post-doc with the group of Qian Yang.
	Computational Behavior Lab group of Antti Oulasvirta at Aalto University, Finland.
	Disney Research Studios in Zürich, Switzerland.
	Spoken Language Systems (LSV) group of Dietrich Klakow at Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany, where I did my PhD.
	Exploratory Data Analysis group of Jilles Vreeken at the Cluster of Excellence (now CISPA Helmholtz Center), Germany.
	Deep Data lab of Gerard de Melo at Rutgers University, USA.
	Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, Germany, with Gerhard Weikum and Andrew Yates.
	the machine translation research and development teams at Amazon in Berlin.
	the Information Systems group at Mainz University.

I also used to make games.

Contact

maido not use thisl@do not use thismichael-do not use thishedderdo not use thisich.de

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