Welcome I am a Lead Principal Applied Scientist at Oracle's OCI GenAI org. Previously, I was a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS AI Labs, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington with Prof. Noah A. Smith and at the Idiap Research Institute with Dr. James Henderson. Before that, I completed my PhD at EPFL in Switzerland, advised by Prof. Andrei Popescu-Belis. My research focuses on multimodal modeling, safety alignment, and robust adaptation, alongside improving foundation model efficiency through better internal representations, scalable long-context attention, and cost-effective training.

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• Oct 2026 — Serving as Area Chair for ICML 2027 and reviewer for ICLR 2027.
• Jan 2026 — Joined Oracle's OCI GenAI org as a Lead Principal Applied Scientist!
• Dec 2025 — Served as a program committee member and reviewer for ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP.
• Nov 2024 — Received the Special Theme Paper Award at EMNLP 2024 for Distribution Edited Model (DEM).
• Feb 2024 — Serving as review committee member of ICLR 2024, ICML 2024, and COLM 2024.
• Jan 2024 — Serving as area chair in Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP track of NAACL-HLT 2024.
Dec 2023 — Serving as senior area chair in Machine Learning for NLP track of EACL 2024.
Dec 2022 — Serving as area chair in Machine Learning for NLP track of EACL 2023.
Nov 2022 — Serving as review committee member of ICLR 2023, ACL 2023, and ICML 2023.
Mar 2022 — Paper on Attention with Bounded-Memory Control was accepted at ACL 2022. ↴
→ Congrats to Hao for leading the project!
Feb 2022 — Serving as review committee member of IJCAI 2022 and and ICML 2022.
Oct 2021 — Serving as review committee member of AAAI 2022, ACL 2022 and ICLR 2022.
Sep 2021 — Papers on Finetuning Transformers into RNNs and Sentence Autoencoders to appear at EMNLP 2021. ↴ → Congrats to Jungo and Ivan for leading the projects!
Jul 2021 — Joined AWS AI Human Language Technology group at Amazon!
Jul 2021 — Serving as review committee member of EMNLP 2021 and NeurIPS 2021.
Mar 2021 — Preprint on Finetuning Pretrained Transformers into RNNs is available on arXiv.
Feb 2021 — Serving as review committee member of ICML 2021, IJCAI 2021 and ACL-IJCNLP 2021.
Jan 2021 — Our paper on Random Feature Attention got a spotlight at ICLR 2021! ↴
→ Congrats to Hao for leading the project!
Jan 2021 — Two papers on Deep-Shallow Models and Random Feature Attention accepted at ICLR 2021.↴
→ Congrats to Jungo and Hao for leading each project respectively!
Oct 2020 — Serving as review committee member of ICLR 2021 and NAACL-HLT 2021.
Sep 2020 — Three papers on Grounded LMs, Multilevel Text Alignment, and PnP Autoencoders accepted at EMNLP 2020.↴
May 2019 — Papers on Generalized Zero-Shot Learning and Sense-Aware NMT will be presented at ACL 2019.
Apr 2019 — Paper on Deep Residual Output Layers for Neural Language Generation was accepted at ICML 2019.
Jan 2019 — Paper on A Generalized Input-Label Embedding for Text Classification to appear in TACL.
Dec 2018 — Won a two-year postdoc fellowship by SNSF to work with prof. Noah Smith at the University of Washington!
Oct 2018 — Paper on Integrating Weakly Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation into Neural MT to appear in TACL.↴
→ Congrats to Xiao for leading the project!
Aug 2018 — Paper on Document-Level Neural MT with Hierarchical Attention Networks was accepted at EMNLP 2018.↴
→ Congrats to Lesly for leading the project!
Aug 2018 — Paper on Joint Input-Output Embeddings for Neural MT was accepted at WMT 2018.
Jun 2018 — Gave an invited talk on Basics and (Modern) Methods for NLP at the Digital School of UnternehmerTUM.
Feb 2018 — Paper on Self-attentive Residual Decoder for Neural MT was accepted at NAACL 2018.↴
→ Congrats to Lesly for leading the project!
Nov 2017 — Won the best paper award at IJCNLP 2017!
Sep 2017 — Paper on Multilingual Hierarchical Attention Networks was accepted at IJCNLP 2017.
Jun 2017 — Paper on Sense-aware Statistical Machine Translation was accepted at WMT 2017.↴
→ Congrats to Xiao for leading the project!
Feb 2017 — Journal paper on Explicit Document Modeling through Multiple-Instance Learning was accepted at JAIR.
Dec 2016 — Gave a lecture on Multilingual Word Sequence Learning for the HLT course at EPFL.
Nov 2016 — Attended EMNLP 2016 conference in Austin, Texas.
Oct 2016 — Gave a lecture on Word Representation Learning for the HLT course at EPFL.

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Contact me at: nik0spapp@gmail.com
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