About
Magamed Taimeskhanov
PhD student, Theory of Machine Learning group
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
I am a PhD student in the Theory of Machine Learning group at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, supervised by Damien Garreau. My primary interests lie in the theory of deep learning, ML interpretability, and optimization.
I also like programming, with proficiency in Python and C++.
Research interests
Updates
- 18 July 2026Thanks to Lambda for their $500 GPU research grant.
- 17 July 2026Participating in the CAIDAS Summer EXPO 2026.
- 17 June 2026Speaking at the Mathematics of Transformers Workshop at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
- 13 May 2026Talking at the group meeting of Prof. Dr. Christophe Zimmer.
- 13 May 2026Recognized as a Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026.
- 7 May 2026Towards Understanding Steering Strength was accepted to ICML 2026 🎉
See you in Seoul!
- 2 February 2026New pre-print on arXiv.
We present a theoretical analysis of LLM activation steering, deriving laws for how steering strength affects next-token probabilities, concept presence, and cross-entropy, and validating the results across 11 modern language models.
- 2 December 2025Talking at the Theory of XAI Workshop (Copenhagen, Denmark).
- 29–30 October 2025Attending the CAIDAS Scientific Opening Conference in Würzburg.
- 20–24 October 2025Attending the Winter School on Causality and Explainable AI in Paris.
- 1 September – 4 October 2025At the LJAD (Nice, France) — visit hosted by Samuel Vaiter.
- 16–22 August 2025In Montreal for IJCAI.
- 2 June 2025Second pre-print on arXiv.
We propose a constructivist approach to feature attribution, first defining attributions for simple models, and then extending the attribution to more complex models.
- 20 December 2024Talking at Centrale Méditerranée (Marseille, France).
- 16–19 December 2024
- 25–27 September 2024Attending the 47th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
- 9–13 September 2024In Vilnius for ECML. Our paper received the Best Paper Award 🎉
- 1 September 2024Starting PhD at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg under the supervision of Prof. Damien Garreau.
- 1–12 July 2024Visiting the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
- 2 April 2024First pre-print on arXiv — to appear at ECML 2024.
We show that CAM-based methods can provably highlight unseen parts of an image.
Contact
- Office
- John-Skilton-Straße 8a, Floor 3
97074 Würzburg, Germany - Phone
- +49 931 31-87482