Senior Researcher @AIgnostics & @ExplainableML | ex-@GoogleDeepMind | PhD in ML from @TUBerlin @bifoldberlin @MPI_CBS | Representations in 🧠 & 🤖| #FirstGen

Joined May 2019
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🥳I am incredibly humbled and grateful to share that our work, "Aligning machine and human visual representations across abstraction levels," has been published today in @Nature: nature.com/articles/s41586-0… For more information see @AndrewLampinen’s post below ⬇️
What aspects of human knowledge do vision models like CLIP fail to capture, and how can we improve them? We suggest models miss key global organization; aligning them makes them more robust. Check out @lukas_mut's work, finally out (in @Nature!?) our new blogpost! 1/4
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Excited to announce that I'll be starting my own lab in Tübingen this October! Hiring at all levels: Postdoc, PhD & RA. Want to work on computational cognitive science at scale? Apply: core-cognition.github.io/ Reposts and shares much appreciated 🙏
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Really glad to see this work out (and honored to be included on it) — I think it does a great job of concretizing some of the intuitions I've had about effects of scaling! Check out the thread for a great summary
We take for granted that larger models are better than smaller ones, but why is this so? Our new paper, led by Jing Huang and @EkdeepL, traces this to a data-induced competition for resources (neurons), using formal analysis, idealized tasks, and real pretraining.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Good morning #ICLR2026 ☀️ The Re-Align workshop kicks off in 30 minutes! A full day on what we can actually do with representational alignment, from brains to language models to agents. Schedule in the thread 👇
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Can context-sensitivity improve human–machine alignment in VFMs? We show that incorporating context improves modeling of human similarity decisions. 🎉Accepted to ReAlign @iclr_conf! Now on @arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2604.13883 Joint first-authored work with amazing Tom Neuhäuser. 1/5
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on our discussions with the Department of War. anthropic.com/news/statement…
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
This is out of control. Pete Hegseth wants to use AI to fire weapons without human input. And he's willing to blackmail a private company in order to do it. He is a threat to our safety and must be fired immediately.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
🎉Happy to share that this work is now published in @CommsPsychol. 🔗You can find the final version here: nature.com/articles/s44271-0…
Why do some memories fade in seconds, while others stay with us for life? Working Memory (WM) holds info for just moments, but certain bits manage to stick around and make it into Long-Term Memory (LTM). In our new ⚡️preprint⚡️, we examined what helps these memories stick. 1/
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Today, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding: the ruling that served as the basis for limits on tailpipe emissions and power plant rules. Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
🚨 Hiring in Munich 🇩🇪: 2 open-topic PhD positions in human & machine learning (TVöD E13 80%). Start ~June 2026 (flexible). Deadline: March 2, 2026. Details in thread 👇 (RTs appreciated) @HelmholtzMunich @helmholtz_ai @ELLISforEurope
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Black History Month is a time to recognize the lived, shared experience of all Black folks who have fundamentally shaped, challenged, and ultimately strengthened America. It’s about taking an unvarnished look at the past so that we can create a better future. As we mark 100 years of celebrating Black history, let’s honor the sacrifices of the leaders who came before us, and recommit ourselves to continuing their work.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
The murder in Minneapolis by the government’s secret police this week has stirred something in me. A mother was gunned down in the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to perform a scripted condolence. No matter which way the tires were pointing, this is a tragedy for her family, her children, and yet JD Vance, Palmer Lucky, and others instantly became the judge and the jury on twitter proclaiming the 37 year old white mother was a domestic terrorist and was trying to murder a federal officer; thus she *deserves* to be shot in the face. And you do too if you don’t comply. Where is the humanity? How is everyone not terrified that this could happen to them, their mother, their sister? Isn’t it terrifying that the Vice President is immediately defending murder of american citizens? I normally keep my politics quiet here because of how toxic twitter is and how annoying it can be to people who want a clean tech feed. Right now it just feels wrong not to say anything. I haven’t quite been able to figure out the right words for how I feel. My first instinct is “fuck ICE” and “what the fuck is wrong with these people”. Those are my lizard brain reactions. But there’s something deeper that’s bothering me. I can’t shake this feeling that the moral foundation that much of modern society stands upon is infected, and is festering. We teach kids that right and wrong exist, not to lie, that you don’t hurt people, and that you protect the vulnerable. And yet our highest elected officials encourage the burning and pillaging of these sacred lessons. I could go on about how our current leadership just wants money and power, and they’re using immigrants as scapegoats to do so. Our economy is transforming rapidly, both with AI and because of greedy capitalist policies — the country is angry about legitimate things and democrats are not actually listening. Republicans are listening but are redirecting anger for their own power. The next 5 years are going to look a lot different because of technology; yet our heads are buried in the sand and we’re losing our way. But maybe the only real thing we can do is to keep living and teaching the lessons of right and wrong, not to lie, that you don’t hurt people, and that you protect the vulnerable. Teach your kids these lessons in spite of Trump, Vance, Noem being lost beyond repair. Teach your kids that everyone deserves to be treated as a human being and not an object to be deported to a brutal prison cell. I do believe that most people are still good, and that the best thing we can do to combat dehumanization by the government is more humanization of our neighbors. Go spend time with your republican cousins / neighbors and break bread with them. Don’t talk politics, play with their kids. Find common humanity. But I don’t really have a call to action beyond this. I don’t really know what to do other than vote in November and refuse to pretend this is normal, publicly, even if it’s terrifying that you might get targeted and attacked. People in Nazi Germany stayed silent for this very fear, and we’re certainly living through a cosplay of that now. The president called a 37 year old mother a domestic terrorist and that her 3 shots to the face by the gestapo was a tragedy of her own making. The actual tragedy is that the Oval office propped up millions of people arguing about the direction of the tires of the car without having the humility to step back and ask if we want the government murdering civilians in broad daylight. I am terribly sad for this country, our broken moral compass, and for hard working immigrants living in fear here. But I do believe we will eventually heal.
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Jan 24
More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion These are just a few of the ways Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science nature.com/immersive/d41586-…
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
.@elonmusk doesn't want MAGA, he wants WAGA or "white America great again" as a racism is great and desirable" paradigm. All non-whites in @tesla, @SpaceX @X etc and all decent whites should quit and join our portfolio. Email us your linkedin!
7 Sep 2025
White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
I try to not talk about politics. I generally believe the best way I can serve the world is as a non-partisan expert, and my genuine beliefs are quite moderate. So the bar is very high for me to comment. But recent events – a federal agent killing an ICU nurse for seemingly no reason and with no provocation – shock the conscience. My deep loyalty is to the principles of classical liberal democracy: freedom of speech, the rule of law, the dignity of the human person. I immigrated to the United States – and eventually cofounded Anthropic here – believing it was a pillar of these principles. I feel very sad today.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
Take a moment to look at the inhumanity captured in this extraordinary photo running on the front page of tonight's Minneapolis @StarTribune. It shows federal immigration agents immobilizing a protester on the ground and spraying chemical irritant directly into his face. The scene reminds me of the brutality used against civil rights protesters in the 1960s. We look back at those old photos and wonder how the authorities could have behaved so savagely; many years from now, young Americans will look at these photos from 2026 and wonder how anyone could have justified shooting a woman in the head as she tried to drive away, arresting 5-year-old schoolchildren on the street, or holding a man down and spaying chemicals into his face. Thanks to the Star Tribune reporters and photographers for documenting this work; they create accountability, they make democracy work, and they make all of us in journalism proud.
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
One of my former research assistants was killed by ICE in Minneapolis today😢 Alex was the kindest, sweetest human and a ICU nurse with a bright future ahead of him May his soul rest in peace and this senseless carnage stop💔
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🚨Go check out our most recent preprint on multilayer attention probing for Vision Transformers! It’s almost as performant as full fine-tuning while being similarly compute efficient as standard linear probing and more interpretable! More in 🧵👇🏼 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.09322
Why you should probe more than just the final layer of your Vision Transformer to maximize performance. 🧵👇
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
This is completely not okay, and we can't become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies. The recent days have been horrific.
🚨BREAKING: Border Patrol just illegally arrested a U.S. citizen… a TEENAGER… in Richfield, Minnesota. The teen was working at Target when agents tackled him and arrested him, while his passport was in his pocket, fully identifying himself as a U.S. citizen. None of it mattered. Why? Because he looked Latino. When a coworker asked who to call, he said, heartbreakingly: “my mom.” Think about that. Your teenage son goes to work, and Border Patrol kidnaps him. This isn’t an isolated incident. ICE and Border Patrol have repeatedly illegally arrested U.S. citizens, especially in Minnesota. And after agents murdered a U.S. citizen who tried to drive away from illegal detention, this should outrage every single American. U.S. citizens do not have to prove their citizenship. Yet, ICE and Border Patrol agents are routinely violating the Constitution, demanding proof anyway… and even refusing to accept drivers licenses or real IDs. And now? Even a passport doesn’t matter. This isn’t enforcement… it’s targeting Americans based on fear and appearance, treating citizens like criminals in their own country. When will this end? When will the government stop stripping citizens of their rights and labeling them terrorists for simply existing?
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Lukas Muttenthaler retweeted
New post! Last week I shared why I thought cognitive (neuro)science hasn’t contributed as much as one might hope to the design of AI systems; this week I'm sharing my thoughts on how methods and principles from these fields *have* been useful in my work. Link below:
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