steve abreu

I am a PhD student at the AI department of the University of Groningen, working in the MINDS group of Prof. Herbert Jaeger. I am affiliated with CogniGron and partially funded by Post-Digital. During my PhD, I was a visiting researcher at ETH Zurich and University of Gent and a research intern at Google and Intel Labs.
In research I keep a dual focus on advancing machine learning while exploring new compute paradigms and hardware for AI, especially those taking inspiration from the brain. I enjoy cross-disciplinary research between AI, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and cognitive science.
Within ML, I am interested in efficiency (e.g., model compression, low-power hardware), continual learning (e.g. using brain-inspired neuromodulation or plasticity rules), meta-learning and automated machine learning, among other things.
To make progress towards well-aligned and interpretable AI, I work on representation engineering and mechanistic interpretability of large language models.
I also work on physical and brain-inspired computing, developing theories that align computation with physics, in order to make better use of neuromorphic chips, photonic devices, and other physical computing systems. I aim to develop computational abstractions in physical substrates (e.g. through the neuromorphic intermediate representation, NIR), new hardware-compatible efficient learning algorithms, and principled ways of programming novel AI hardware.
I am also a hobby photographer, an enthusiastic coffee brewer, an avid motorcyclist, I like to read, travel, and go to music and art events.
news
May 2025 | Presented “Large Language Models on a Tiny Power Budget” at ISCAS 2025 (Slides here) |
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Apr 2025 | Presented four workshop papers at ICLR in Singapore! |
Dec 2024 | Joris presented our paper on conceptor steering at the MINT workshop at NeurIPS in Vancouver! |
Jul 2024 | Spent two weeks at Telluride in the Language and Thought topic area, presented our work on quantized SSMs at ICML in Vienna, and our neuromorphic programming paper at ICONS in Virginia! |
May 2024 | Starting my research internship at Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, working on neuromorphic transformer-like architectures based on state space models. |
Dec 2023 | Starting my research internship at Google in Waterloo (Canada), working on efficient and adaptive AR user interfaces with multimodal LLMs. |
Oct 2023 | Attending NNPC in Hannover. Presenting a poster on neuromorphic programming and abstractions. |
Jun 2023 | Spent three weeks in Telluride to work on neuromorphic abstractions, representation learning in RL, and other exciting stuff! |
Jun 2023 | Presenting our neuromorphic cytometry paper at CVPR (event-based vision workshop) in Vancouver. |
Apr 2023 | Attending CHI in Hamburg. Giving a talk on interfacing with bio-inspired computer hardware at the workshop on Bio-Digital Interfaces for Human-Computer Interaction. |
Apr 2023 | Gave a talk about neuromorphic computing to AI students in Groningen: “Computing and engineering principles from the brain”. Slides here. |
Dec 2022 | Spent 3 months at the University of Gent in the Photonics Research Group, working on photonic computing and neuromorphic flow cytometry (see publications, CVPR-W ‘23). |
Jun 2022 | Spent a week learning and discussing about machine learning and photonics in Como. |
Jun 2022 | Spent three months at the Institute of Neuroinformatics (ETH/UZH in Zurich), working on mixed-signal neuromorphic hardware. |
May 2022 | Talk on physical reservoir computing to the CogniGron research center (slides). |
Feb 2022 | Presentation on my PhD topic to the CogniGron center of cognitive materials (slides). |