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Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Fabio Ferreira

Postal address
Institut für Informatik
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Sekretariat Hutter/Maschinelles Lernen
Georges-Köhler-Allee 074
79110 Freiburg, Germany
Fax
+49 761 203-74217
Office
Building 74, Room 00-014
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About

I am a Machine Learning Researcher at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and ELLIS Unit Freiburg, working on post-training and evaluation of multilingual LLMs as part of the OpenEuroLLM project. I also serve as the HPC cluster lead for the Technical Faculty. Previously, I completed my PhD at the Machine Learning Lab under Frank Hutter, focusing on meta-learning, synthetic data generation, and transfer learning. Before that, I worked at the Stanford AI Lab in Jeannette Bohg’s IPRL group on robotic manipulation. I hold an M.Sc. from KIT in CS/Machine Learning and am an alumnus of the German National Academic Scholarship Foundation.

Research Interests

  • Post-training and instruction tuning of LLMs
  • Multilingual LLM evaluation
  • Synthetic data generation
  • Transfer learning and automated finetuning

Student Supervision

Getting in touch: if you are a strong student interested in working with me on the above research areas, feel free to reach out via email. To assess fit, please answer the questions listed on this webpage and attach any relevant material (code, figures, paper summaries, or a paper you contributed to significantly).

Publications

2025

Ferreira, Fabio; Rapant, Ivo; Franke, Jörg K. H.; Hutter, Frank

Beyond Random Augmentations: Pretraining with Hard Views Conference

Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.

2024

Ferreira, Fabio; Schlageter, Moreno; Rajan, Raghu; Biedenkapp, André; Hutter, Frank

One-shot World Models Using a Transformer Trained on a Synthetic Prior Proceedings Article

In: NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Open-World Agents, 2024.

Strangmann, Tobias; Purucker, Lennart; Franke, Jörg K. H.; Rapant, Ivo; Ferreira, Fabio; Hutter, Frank

Transfer Learning for Finetuning Large Language Models Proceedings Article

In: NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Adaptive Foundation Models, 2024.

Rapant, Ivo; Purucker, Lennart; Ferreira, Fabio; Arango, Sebastian Pineda; Kadra, Arlind; Grabocka, Josif; Hutter, Frank

Quick-Tune-Tool: A Practical Tool and its User Guide for Automatically Finetuning Pretrained Models Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Automated Machine Learning (AutoML 2024), Workshop Track, 2024.

Arango, Sebastian Pineda; Ferreira, Fabio; Kadra, Arlind; Hutter, Frank; Grabocka, Josif

Quick-Tune: Quickly Learning Which Pretrained Model to Finetune and How Proceedings Article

In: The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024, (Oral Presentation).

2023

Rajan, Raghu; Diaz, Jessica Lizeth Borja; Guttikonda, Suresh; Ferreira, Fabio; Biedenkapp, André; von Hartz, Jan Ole; Hutter, Frank

MDP Playground: An Analysis and Debug Testbed for Reinforcement Learning Journal Article

In: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), vol. 77, pp. 821-890, 2023.

Arango, Sebastian Pineda; Ferreira, Fabio; Kadra, Arlind; Hutter, Frank; Grabocka, Josif

Quick-Tune: Quickly Learning Which Pretrained Model to Finetune and How Conference

2023.

2022

Wagner, Diane; Ferreira, Fabio; Stoll, Danny; Schirrmeister, Robin Tibor; Müller, Samuel; Hutter, Frank

On the Importance of Hyperparameters and Data Augmentation for Self-Supervised Learning Workshop

ICML Pre-training Workshop, 2022.

Öztürk*, Ekrem; Ferreira*, Fabio; Jomaa*, Hadi S.; Schmidt-Thieme, Lars; Grabocka, Josif; Hutter, Frank

Zero-shot AutoML with Pretrained Models Proceedings Article

In: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.

Ferreira, Fabio; Nierhoff, Thomas; Sälinger, Andreas; Hutter, Frank

Learning Synthetic Environments and Reward Networks for Reinforcement Learning Proceedings Article

In: 10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), OpenReview.net, 2022.

2021

Rajan, Raghu; Diaz, Jessica Lizeth Borja; Guttikonda, Suresh; Ferreira, Fabio; Biedenkapp, André; von Hartz, Jan Ole; Hutter, Frank

MDP Playground: A Design and Debug Testbed for Reinforcement Learning Proceedings Article

In: arXiv:1909.07750, 2021.

Ferreira, Fabio; Nierhoff, Thomas; Hutter, Frank

Learning Synthetic Environments for Reinforcement Learning with Evolution Strategies Journal Article

In: AAAI workshop on Meta-Learning Challenges, 2021.

2020

Liu, Zhengying; Pavao, Adrien; Xu, Zhen; Escalera, Sergio; Ferreira, Fabio; Guyon, Isabelle; Hong, Sirui; Hutter, Frank; Ji, Rongrong; Junior, Julio C S Jacques; Li, Ge; Lindauer, Marius; Luo, Zhipeng; Madadi, Meysam; Nierhoff, Thomas; Niu, Kangning; Pan, Chunguang; Stoll, Danny; Treguer, Sebastien; Wang, Jin; Wang, Peng; Wu, Chenglin; Xiong, Youcheng; Zela, Arber; Zhang, Yang

Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analyses of the ChaLearn AutoDL Challenge 2019 Journal Article

In: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 43, no. 9, pp. 3108-3125, 2020.