Researcher profile

Imanol Schlag

Imanol Schlag contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Benchmarking Concept-Spilling Across Languages in LLMs

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable cross-lingual abilities, yet often exhibit a systematic bias toward the representations from other languages, resulting in semantic interference when generating content in non-English languages$-$a phenomenon we define as language spilling. This paper presents a novel comparative framework for evaluating multilingual semantic robustness by systematically measuring how models handle polysemous words across languages. Our methodology provides a relative measure of model performance: when required to generate exactly five meanings, both strong and weak models may resort to meanings from dominant languages, but semantically stronger models do so later in the generation sequence, producing more true meanings from the target language before failing, while weaker models resort to dominant-language meanings earlier in the sequence. We evaluate a diverse set of open and closed multilingual LLMs using a structured meaning generation task across nine languages, employing a carefully curated benchmark of 100 high-polysemy English words. Our findings reveal significant variation in semantic robustness across both models and languages, providing a principled ranking system for model comparison without requiring definitive causal attribution of error sources. We contribute both a scalable comparative benchmark for multilingual semantic evaluation and a rigorous validation pipeline$-$critical tools for developing more linguistically balanced AI systems.

preprint2026arXiv

POLAR-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Privacy-Utility Trade-offs in LLM Agents

LLM agents increasingly have access to private user data and act on the user's behalf when interacting with third-party systems. The user defines what may and must not be shared, and the agent must robustly follow that intent even when third-party systems behave adversarially. We introduce POLAR-Bench (Policy-aware adversarial Benchmark), in which a trusted model with a privacy policy and a task converses with a third-party model that adversarially probes for both task-relevant and protected attributes. Across 10 domains and 7,852 samples, we score privacy and utility by deterministic set-membership and vary privacy policy dimension and attack strategy along two orthogonal axes, producing a 5 times 5 diagnostic surface per model. Our results reveal a sharp split: current frontier models withhold over 99% of protected attributes, while smaller open-weight models in the 1--30B range, the class users most commonly run as their own trusted agent on-device or via private inference, score notably worse, with the weakest leaking over half. POLAR-Bench thus localizes where each model's intent-following breaks down, providing a foothold for privacy alignment where it matters most.

preprint2022arXiv

A Modern Self-Referential Weight Matrix That Learns to Modify Itself

The weight matrix (WM) of a neural network (NN) is its program. The programs of many traditional NNs are learned through gradient descent in some error function, then remain fixed. The WM of a self-referential NN, however, can keep rapidly modifying all of itself during runtime. In principle, such NNs can meta-learn to learn, and meta-meta-learn to meta-learn to learn, and so on, in the sense of recursive self-improvement. While NN architectures potentially capable of implementing such behaviour have been proposed since the '90s, there have been few if any practical studies. Here we revisit such NNs, building upon recent successes of fast weight programmers and closely related linear Transformers. We propose a scalable self-referential WM (SRWM) that learns to use outer products and the delta update rule to modify itself. We evaluate our SRWM in supervised few-shot learning and in multi-task reinforcement learning with procedurally generated game environments. Our experiments demonstrate both practical applicability and competitive performance of the proposed SRWM. Our code is public.

preprint2022arXiv

Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models

Language models have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of tasks that require natural language understanding. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art models have generally struggled with tasks that require quantitative reasoning, such as solving mathematics, science, and engineering problems at the college level. To help close this gap, we introduce Minerva, a large language model pretrained on general natural language data and further trained on technical content. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance on technical benchmarks without the use of external tools. We also evaluate our model on over two hundred undergraduate-level problems in physics, biology, chemistry, economics, and other sciences that require quantitative reasoning, and find that the model can correctly answer nearly a third of them.

preprint2021arXiv

Improving Baselines in the Wild

We share our experience with the recently released WILDS benchmark, a collection of ten datasets dedicated to developing models and training strategies which are robust to domain shifts. Several experiments yield a couple of critical observations which we believe are of general interest for any future work on WILDS. Our study focuses on two datasets: iWildCam and FMoW. We show that (1) Conducting separate cross-validation for each evaluation metric is crucial for both datasets, (2) A weak correlation between validation and test performance might make model development difficult for iWildCam, (3) Minor changes in the training of hyper-parameters improve the baseline by a relatively large margin (mainly on FMoW), (4) There is a strong correlation between certain domains and certain target labels (mainly on iWildCam). To the best of our knowledge, no prior work on these datasets has reported these observations despite their obvious importance. Our code is public.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning Associative Inference Using Fast Weight Memory

Humans can quickly associate stimuli to solve problems in novel contexts. Our novel neural network model learns state representations of facts that can be composed to perform such associative inference. To this end, we augment the LSTM model with an associative memory, dubbed Fast Weight Memory (FWM). Through differentiable operations at every step of a given input sequence, the LSTM updates and maintains compositional associations stored in the rapidly changing FWM weights. Our model is trained end-to-end by gradient descent and yields excellent performance on compositional language reasoning problems, meta-reinforcement-learning for POMDPs, and small-scale word-level language modelling.