Spotlight on Mariya Toneva

She’s an ELLIS Member part of the ELLIS Unit Saarbrücken, and researches natural language processing and computational cognitive neuroscience.

She just won an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant so over the next five years her project BrainAlign will receive funding of nearly 1.5 million euros for research on "brain-aligned language models for long-range language understanding and neuroscientific insight." 👏

Mariya says, "With the ERC Starting Grant, our goal is to bring large language models (LLMs) closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain. To accomplish this, we will leverage large amounts of non-invasive brain recordings and develop new approaches for training, evaluation, and interpretability of LLMs. Beyond advancing AI, brain-aligned LLMs will serve as powerful computational models of natural language in the brain, offering new insights into the neural mechanisms of everyday language."