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

Oct 2026	We will be at EMNLP with two main papers on interpreting translation dynamics in multilingual pretraining and on diagnosing multilingual reasoning in LLMs with directed acyclic trace graphs. See you in Budapest 🇭🇺
Oct 2026	I’ll be in Cologne for a talk on LLMs for Cultural Digital Heritage 🏛️
Oct 2026	I’ll present our group’s recent works at the Frontier AI Innovation Summit 🤖
Jul 2026	Congratulations to Florian for the accepted ICML paper on ExPLAIND, a new interpretability method that unifies perspectives on data, model component and training dynamics 🇰🇷
Jul 2026	Congratulations to Raoyuan for two accepted papers at ACL on model robustness and multilingual reasoning! I was also involved on ACL papers on steering as a method for adaptation, pre-training for African languages and script representation in speech models 🇺🇸
Jun 2026	I’ll give a talk on LLM technology for Digital Humanities at Stuttgart University 📖
May 2026	I got interviewed by Deutschlandfunk (German national radio) for a report on small language models 📻

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.
	Aalto University, Finland, in the Computational Behavior Lab group of Antti Oulasvirta.
	Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany, at the Spoken Language Systems (LSV) group of Dietrich Klakow, where I did my PhD.

and more wonderful places.

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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Google Scholar

University address

	Disney Research Studios in Zürich, Switzerland.
	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.