[lamarr-nlp] Guest Talk by Jan Philip Wahle from University of Goettingen | Can We Trust What Models Think and Say?

Wednesday 9 Sept 2026, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

As part of the Lamarr NLP Colloquium, we have the pleasure to host Jan Philip Wahle from University of Goettingen. Jan will give a talk on the trustworthiness of language models.

Title: Can We Trust What Models Think and Say?

Abstract:

Can we trust a model simply because its outputs look correct, harmless, or well-reasoned? As language models become more capable, this question becomes increasingly difficult to answer. Undesirable behavior may remain hidden in seemingly benign outputs, while verbalized reasoning may not faithfully reflect the computations that drive a model’s decisions. In this talk, I will examine what it means to trust model behavior and how that trust can be measured. Using covert information leakage and reasoning faithfulness as two case studies, I will discuss where behavioral evaluation breaks down, what chain-of-thought can and cannot reveal, and how internal representations can help us distinguish safe-looking behavior from genuinely trustworthy model behavior.

 

Bio:

Dr. Jan Philip Wahle is a faculty member at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on reasoning methods for large language models, including reinforcement learning and agentic systems, and on AI safety through mechanistic interpretability. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Göttingen and was a visiting researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, working with Saif M. Mohammad. Before entering academia, he worked on machine learning for autonomous driving at Aptiv. His research has been published at venues including ACL and EMNLP and has received the ACL Best Resource Paper Award and the SemEval Best Task Award.

 

Looking forward to your participation.

Date: Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Time: 11:00 - 12:00 pm (CET).
Location:  Friedrich-Hirzebruch-Allee 6, 53115 Bonn, Germany
Room: 2.122 + Zoom
Zoom:  https://uni-bonn.zoom-x.de/j/63819604806?pwd=64PSGa9HyTym9j1bjy6jhcJF3eHebi.1