Ekin Akyürek

I am a research scientist at OpenAI, where I work on novel reinforcement learning algorithms for training general-purpose agents. I did my PhD in Computer Science at MIT and advised by Jacob Andreas. I studied how neural networks acquire human-like generalization in language, uncovering algorithmic structures underlying in-context learning in language models (PhD Thesis: Inference-Time Learning Algorithms of Language Models).

biography

I was born in the small city of Soma in Manisa, Türkiye. I attended Izmir Science High School. During my high school years, I was selected to represent Türkiye at the International Physics Olympiads — I won a bronze medal. Then, I earned Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical & Electronics Engineering and Physics from Koç University, where I actively contributed to the KUIS AI Lab with Prof. Deniz Yuret.

In the final year of undergraduate studies, I was a visiting student at MIT CSAIL, collaborating with Prof. Alan Edelman on a linear algebraic approach to backpropagation, and work with John Fisher on compute-efficient algorithms for bayesian non-parametrics. Subsequently, I began my PhD and still working with Jacob Andreas. I’ve done two internships at Google Research, first, collaborating with Kelvin Guu and Keith Hall on fact attribution for large language models using influence functions. I also interned at Google Brain Team (now Google-Deepmind) on understanding in-context learning and mentored by Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma, Dale Schuurmans.

I am maried to my lovely wife Afra Feyza Akyürek, and we live in Boston, MA.

I am an outdoor and summer person, I like swimming, biking, sailing and hiking whenever Boston weather allows. My wife and I enjoy traveling together to discover new places around the world. I do play guitar to chill. I do like cooking and learning new recipes (e.g. I can make a Texas style brisket at home).