alan-turing-institute/robots-in-disguise

Information and materials for the Turing's "robots-in-disguise" reading group on fundamental AI research.

Jupyter Notebook

34

360 commits

updated Sep 17, 2026

See the code

README

Robots in Disguise

Public repo for The Alan Turing Institute's reading group on LLMs and related things.

If you're based at the Turing, follow #robots-in-disguise on the Turing Slack for the most recent updates.

Overview

The group meets every week on Thursday, usually at 11-12. Everyone is welcome to join! If you have any questions email Fede Nanni or Alex Hickey.

Please get in touch if you would like to give a talk (either about your research or a topic you think is relevant to the reading group).

Upcoming Schedule

DateTopicRoomLead
17/09/26Looped TransformersMae JemisonFede
25/09/26Vulnerability detection in the age of AIDavid BlackwellEvelina Gabasova
01/10/26Overview of recent cyber incidentsAda LovelaceJack Roberts

Previous sessions

DateTopicRoomLead
10/09/26LLM Memory and PolicyDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
03/09/26Controlled Diffusion GenerationDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
06/08/26Speculative decodingDavid BlackwellJack Roberts
30/07/26Anthropic's J-lensDavid BlackwellRoksana Goworek
16/07/26Using Local Coding AgentsMarian RejewskiFede
09/07/26Graph Representation Learning Augmented Model Manipulation on Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMsDavid BlackwellFede
Show the previous sessions
DateTopicRoomLead
02/07/26Memory in LLMsDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
25/06/26Hybrid ArchitecturesDavid BlackwellFede
18/06/26Self-Adapting Language Models & othersDavid BlackwellFede
26/03/26The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMsDavid BlackwellFede
19/03/26Reasoning Models Generate Societies of ThoughtDavid BlackwellEd Gunn
10/02/26Dropout as a Bayesian ApproximationDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
22/01/26LLM inference engine buildingEnigmaFede
20/11/25DeepSeek OCRDavid BlackwellFede & Rosie
06/11/25Continual Learning via Sparse Memory FinetuningMargaret HamiltonFede
30/10/25LLMs for Audio-Visual Speech RecognitionDavid BlackwellPhil Swatton
23/10/25Agentic Context EngineeringDavid BlackwellFede
22/09/25On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based RetrievalDavid BlackwellFede & Alex
02/06/25Enrichment Students Project PresentationsMargaret HamiltonSandrine Chausson & Yara Kyrychenko
28/05/25Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent DebateJack GoodFede
21/05/25Test-Time Reinforcement LearningDavid BlackwellFede
12/05/25Event Extaction with LLMsDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
07/04/25Enrichment Students project talkDavid BlackwellSushant Gautam & Yara Kyrychenko
24/03/25S1: Simple test-time scalingDavid BlackwellFede
03/03/25Alignment reduces LLMs conceptual diversityDavid BlackwellFede
17/02/25DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report (part 2)Florence NightingaleFede
10/02/25DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report: Group DiscussionDavid BlackwellFede & Ryan
03/02/25DeepSeek-R1: Group DiscussionDavid BlackwellFede & Ryan
16/12/24Improving training with better learning rate and batch size: Linear scaling rule from random matrix theory (Slides)David BlackwellChanju Park
09/12/24Scaling laws of neural networks (Slides)David BlackwellEdmund Dable-Heath
03/12/24Mechanistic InterpretabilityEnigmaNeel Nanda
02/12/24Diffusion modelsAda LovelaceJames Thornton
02/12/24Can language models play the Wikipedia game? (Slides)David BlackwellAlex Hickey, Jo Knight
25/11/24Application of foundation models in time series tasksDavid BlackwellGholamali Aminian
20/11/24Mechanistic Interpretability III (Slides)DelilahRyan Chan
18/11/24Biological neural networks (Slides, Slides)David BlackwellBalázs Mészáros , Jess Yu
04/11/24Invited Talk: Ethnographic Approaches to AI EvaluationsUrsula FranklinJonas Kgomo
28/10/24No Language Left Behind (NLLB) Technical Report Overview (Slides)David BlackwellGiulia Occhini, Ryan Chan
14/10/24Invited Talk: Causal Estimation of Memorisation Profiles (Slides)David BlackwellPietro Lesci
07/10/24Invited Talk: Federating Large Language Models from Scratch (Slides)David BlackwellLorenzo Sani
02/10/24Mechanistic Interpretability II (Slides)DelilahRyan Chan
23/09/24Mechanistic Interpretability I (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
09/09/24Invited Talk: On the Brittleness of Prompts in LLMs (Slides)David BlackwellHan Zhou
03/09/24Invited Talk: Sociotechnical Safety Evaluation of AI systems (Slides)EnigmaLaura Weidinger
28/08/24Mixture of Experts (Slides)Jack GoodAngus R Williams
19/08/24Overview of Knowledge Graphs (Slides)David BlackwellNavdeep Kaur
12/08/24Llama 3.1 Report Overview (Slides)Ursula FranklinEdwin Brown, Ryan Chan
05/08/24Invited Talk: The growth of parallelism in machine learning inference (Slides)Ursula FranklinTim Harris (Microsoft)
22/07/24Invited Talk: Designing a Value-driven GAI Framework for Social Good: Embedding Social Good Values into GAI Models (Slides)Ursula FranklinVictor OK Li, Jacqueline CK Lam and Jon Crowcroft
15/07/24Invited Talk: Open science projects for open-source models and transparent open datasetsCipherChristopher Klamm
08/07/24Invited Talk: Equally Safe Online? A participatory approach to tackling Gender-Based Violence (Slides)David BlackwellGavin Abercrombie
01/07/24A perspective on the fundamentals of transformers (Slides)Ursula FranklinEd Gunn
04/06/24Invited Talk: Are we ready for attacks on machine learning?Enigma (2.30pm)Nicholas Carlini
20/05/24KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold NetworksUrsula FranklinAndrew Duncan
13/05/24Overview of LLM Security (Slides)David BlackwellEd Chapman, Burak Hasircioglu, Ezzeldin Zaki
29/04/24Invited Talk: How to Catch an AI Liar: Lie Detection in Black-Box LLMs by Asking Unrelated Questions (Slides)David BlackwellLorenzo Pacchiardi
22/04/24Research at Turing: Learn how to learn and distil during learning - Using meta-learning and second order optimisation to prune the modelDavid BlackwellYilei Liang
15/04/24Research at Turing: Natural Logic-based Fact Verification with LLMsDavid BlackwellMarek Strong
08/04/24Paper overviews (Slides, Slides)Ursula FranklinFede Nanni, Markus Hauru, Praveen Selvaraj
18/03/24Research at Turing: Not even a Chinese Room: evaluating LLMs on code simulationDavid BlackwellEmanuele La Malfa
11/03/24Research at Turing: Applying Vision Transformers in Neuroscience (Slides)David BlackwellBryan Li
04/03/24Discussion: Expanding participatory governance for LLMs: case studies from BigCode, Aya Initiative, and Collective Intelligence Project (Slides)David BlackwellJennifer Ding
26/02/24Research at Turing: Machine translation quality estimation (Slides)David BlackwellRadka Jersakova, Jo Knight
19/02/24Research at Turing: Longitudinal NLP (Slides)David BlackwellJenny Chim, Talia Tseriotou
12/02/24Mechanistic interpretability (Slides)David BlackwellPraveen Selvaraj
05/02/24Discussion: Existential Risk of AI? (Slides)David BlackwellLevan Bokeria
29/01/24Vision Transformers Need Registers (Slides)David BlackwellTom Davies
22/01/24Research at Turing: Spatial Graph Patterning of Filamentous StructuresDavid BlackwellKristina Ulicna
15/01/24Retentive Networks (Slides)David BlackwellEd Gunn
08/01/24Discussion: Benchmarking AI applications on GPUs (Slides)David BlackwellTomas Lazauskas, David Llewellyn-Jones
11/12/23Stable Diffusion (Slides)David BlackwellEdmund Dable-Heath
04/12/23Discussion: Best Practice for Responsible Foundation Models – What Should Developers Do and How You Can Help (Slides)Ursula FranklinCarolyn Ashurst
20/11/23Research at Turing: Transformers for coding/software engineering (Slides)Mae JemisonAnastasiia Grishina
13/11/23Introduction to Diffusion models (Slides)David BlackwellEdmund Dable-Heath
06/11/23Discussion: Current challenges and future directions in safety evaluations for generative AI (Slides)David BlackwellJonathan Bright
30/10/23Knowledge retrieval (Slides)David BlackwellPraveen Selvaraj
16/10/23Prompt Engineering (Slides)David BlackwellMartin Stoffel
02/10/23Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback (RLHF) (Slides)David BlackwellEseoghene Ben-Iwhiwhu
25/09/23LoRA (+ parameter efficient fine-tuning) part II (Notebook)Margaret HamiltonJack Roberts
18/09/23LoRA (+ parameter efficient fine-tuning) part I (Slides)David BlackwellJack Roberts
21/08/23Vision Transformers part II (Slides)David BlackwellKatie Awty-Carroll
07/08/23Vision Transformers part I (Slides)David BlackwellKatie Awty-Carroll, Ryan Chan
24/07/23GPT: Pretraining Decoders (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
10/07/23BERT: Masked Language modelling and Pre-training (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
26/06/23Attention (continued) (Slides) & Transformer Encoder and Decoders (Slides)David BlackwellMartin Stoffel, Ryan Chan
31/05/23Reginald overview & Attention and self-attention networks (Notebook)David BlackwellEvelina Gabasova, Martin Stoffel
15/05/23Hands-on RNN/LSTM session (Materials)David BlackwellNathan Simpson, Levan Bokeria, David Llewellyn-Jones
03/05/23Sequence-to-sequence models part II: Encoder-decoder models (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
17/04/23Sequence-to-sequence models part I: RNNs/LSTMs (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
03/04/23Deep Learning Basics (Slides)David BlackwellPhil Swatton, Jack Roberts
20/03/23Introduction to word embeddings and language modelling (Slides)David BlackwellFede Nanni

Background

The reading group originated from the Research Engineering Team's reading group on Transformers. Between 2023 and 2025, it was co-organised by Ryan Chan and Fede Nanni, with the help of Giulia Occhini.

deep-learning
diffusion-models
foundation-model
hut23
language-models
large-language-models
machine-learning
nlp
transformers

Contributors

rchan26

218 commits

fedenanni

80 commits

jack89roberts

8 commits

llewelld

7 commits

alan-turing-institute/robots-in-disguise

Information and materials for the Turing's "robots-in-disguise" reading group on fundamental AI research.

Jupyter Notebook

34

360 commits

updated Sep 17, 2026

See the code

README

Robots in Disguise

Public repo for The Alan Turing Institute's reading group on LLMs and related things.

If you're based at the Turing, follow #robots-in-disguise on the Turing Slack for the most recent updates.

Overview

The group meets every week on Thursday, usually at 11-12. Everyone is welcome to join! If you have any questions email Fede Nanni or Alex Hickey.

Please get in touch if you would like to give a talk (either about your research or a topic you think is relevant to the reading group).

Upcoming Schedule

DateTopicRoomLead
17/09/26Looped TransformersMae JemisonFede
25/09/26Vulnerability detection in the age of AIDavid BlackwellEvelina Gabasova
01/10/26Overview of recent cyber incidentsAda LovelaceJack Roberts

Previous sessions

DateTopicRoomLead
10/09/26LLM Memory and PolicyDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
03/09/26Controlled Diffusion GenerationDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
06/08/26Speculative decodingDavid BlackwellJack Roberts
30/07/26Anthropic's J-lensDavid BlackwellRoksana Goworek
16/07/26Using Local Coding AgentsMarian RejewskiFede
09/07/26Graph Representation Learning Augmented Model Manipulation on Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMsDavid BlackwellFede
Show the previous sessions
DateTopicRoomLead
02/07/26Memory in LLMsDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
25/06/26Hybrid ArchitecturesDavid BlackwellFede
18/06/26Self-Adapting Language Models & othersDavid BlackwellFede
26/03/26The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMsDavid BlackwellFede
19/03/26Reasoning Models Generate Societies of ThoughtDavid BlackwellEd Gunn
10/02/26Dropout as a Bayesian ApproximationDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
22/01/26LLM inference engine buildingEnigmaFede
20/11/25DeepSeek OCRDavid BlackwellFede & Rosie
06/11/25Continual Learning via Sparse Memory FinetuningMargaret HamiltonFede
30/10/25LLMs for Audio-Visual Speech RecognitionDavid BlackwellPhil Swatton
23/10/25Agentic Context EngineeringDavid BlackwellFede
22/09/25On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based RetrievalDavid BlackwellFede & Alex
02/06/25Enrichment Students Project PresentationsMargaret HamiltonSandrine Chausson & Yara Kyrychenko
28/05/25Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent DebateJack GoodFede
21/05/25Test-Time Reinforcement LearningDavid BlackwellFede
12/05/25Event Extaction with LLMsDavid BlackwellAlex Hickey
07/04/25Enrichment Students project talkDavid BlackwellSushant Gautam & Yara Kyrychenko
24/03/25S1: Simple test-time scalingDavid BlackwellFede
03/03/25Alignment reduces LLMs conceptual diversityDavid BlackwellFede
17/02/25DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report (part 2)Florence NightingaleFede
10/02/25DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report: Group DiscussionDavid BlackwellFede & Ryan
03/02/25DeepSeek-R1: Group DiscussionDavid BlackwellFede & Ryan
16/12/24Improving training with better learning rate and batch size: Linear scaling rule from random matrix theory (Slides)David BlackwellChanju Park
09/12/24Scaling laws of neural networks (Slides)David BlackwellEdmund Dable-Heath
03/12/24Mechanistic InterpretabilityEnigmaNeel Nanda
02/12/24Diffusion modelsAda LovelaceJames Thornton
02/12/24Can language models play the Wikipedia game? (Slides)David BlackwellAlex Hickey, Jo Knight
25/11/24Application of foundation models in time series tasksDavid BlackwellGholamali Aminian
20/11/24Mechanistic Interpretability III (Slides)DelilahRyan Chan
18/11/24Biological neural networks (Slides, Slides)David BlackwellBalázs Mészáros , Jess Yu
04/11/24Invited Talk: Ethnographic Approaches to AI EvaluationsUrsula FranklinJonas Kgomo
28/10/24No Language Left Behind (NLLB) Technical Report Overview (Slides)David BlackwellGiulia Occhini, Ryan Chan
14/10/24Invited Talk: Causal Estimation of Memorisation Profiles (Slides)David BlackwellPietro Lesci
07/10/24Invited Talk: Federating Large Language Models from Scratch (Slides)David BlackwellLorenzo Sani
02/10/24Mechanistic Interpretability II (Slides)DelilahRyan Chan
23/09/24Mechanistic Interpretability I (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
09/09/24Invited Talk: On the Brittleness of Prompts in LLMs (Slides)David BlackwellHan Zhou
03/09/24Invited Talk: Sociotechnical Safety Evaluation of AI systems (Slides)EnigmaLaura Weidinger
28/08/24Mixture of Experts (Slides)Jack GoodAngus R Williams
19/08/24Overview of Knowledge Graphs (Slides)David BlackwellNavdeep Kaur
12/08/24Llama 3.1 Report Overview (Slides)Ursula FranklinEdwin Brown, Ryan Chan
05/08/24Invited Talk: The growth of parallelism in machine learning inference (Slides)Ursula FranklinTim Harris (Microsoft)
22/07/24Invited Talk: Designing a Value-driven GAI Framework for Social Good: Embedding Social Good Values into GAI Models (Slides)Ursula FranklinVictor OK Li, Jacqueline CK Lam and Jon Crowcroft
15/07/24Invited Talk: Open science projects for open-source models and transparent open datasetsCipherChristopher Klamm
08/07/24Invited Talk: Equally Safe Online? A participatory approach to tackling Gender-Based Violence (Slides)David BlackwellGavin Abercrombie
01/07/24A perspective on the fundamentals of transformers (Slides)Ursula FranklinEd Gunn
04/06/24Invited Talk: Are we ready for attacks on machine learning?Enigma (2.30pm)Nicholas Carlini
20/05/24KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold NetworksUrsula FranklinAndrew Duncan
13/05/24Overview of LLM Security (Slides)David BlackwellEd Chapman, Burak Hasircioglu, Ezzeldin Zaki
29/04/24Invited Talk: How to Catch an AI Liar: Lie Detection in Black-Box LLMs by Asking Unrelated Questions (Slides)David BlackwellLorenzo Pacchiardi
22/04/24Research at Turing: Learn how to learn and distil during learning - Using meta-learning and second order optimisation to prune the modelDavid BlackwellYilei Liang
15/04/24Research at Turing: Natural Logic-based Fact Verification with LLMsDavid BlackwellMarek Strong
08/04/24Paper overviews (Slides, Slides)Ursula FranklinFede Nanni, Markus Hauru, Praveen Selvaraj
18/03/24Research at Turing: Not even a Chinese Room: evaluating LLMs on code simulationDavid BlackwellEmanuele La Malfa
11/03/24Research at Turing: Applying Vision Transformers in Neuroscience (Slides)David BlackwellBryan Li
04/03/24Discussion: Expanding participatory governance for LLMs: case studies from BigCode, Aya Initiative, and Collective Intelligence Project (Slides)David BlackwellJennifer Ding
26/02/24Research at Turing: Machine translation quality estimation (Slides)David BlackwellRadka Jersakova, Jo Knight
19/02/24Research at Turing: Longitudinal NLP (Slides)David BlackwellJenny Chim, Talia Tseriotou
12/02/24Mechanistic interpretability (Slides)David BlackwellPraveen Selvaraj
05/02/24Discussion: Existential Risk of AI? (Slides)David BlackwellLevan Bokeria
29/01/24Vision Transformers Need Registers (Slides)David BlackwellTom Davies
22/01/24Research at Turing: Spatial Graph Patterning of Filamentous StructuresDavid BlackwellKristina Ulicna
15/01/24Retentive Networks (Slides)David BlackwellEd Gunn
08/01/24Discussion: Benchmarking AI applications on GPUs (Slides)David BlackwellTomas Lazauskas, David Llewellyn-Jones
11/12/23Stable Diffusion (Slides)David BlackwellEdmund Dable-Heath
04/12/23Discussion: Best Practice for Responsible Foundation Models – What Should Developers Do and How You Can Help (Slides)Ursula FranklinCarolyn Ashurst
20/11/23Research at Turing: Transformers for coding/software engineering (Slides)Mae JemisonAnastasiia Grishina
13/11/23Introduction to Diffusion models (Slides)David BlackwellEdmund Dable-Heath
06/11/23Discussion: Current challenges and future directions in safety evaluations for generative AI (Slides)David BlackwellJonathan Bright
30/10/23Knowledge retrieval (Slides)David BlackwellPraveen Selvaraj
16/10/23Prompt Engineering (Slides)David BlackwellMartin Stoffel
02/10/23Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback (RLHF) (Slides)David BlackwellEseoghene Ben-Iwhiwhu
25/09/23LoRA (+ parameter efficient fine-tuning) part II (Notebook)Margaret HamiltonJack Roberts
18/09/23LoRA (+ parameter efficient fine-tuning) part I (Slides)David BlackwellJack Roberts
21/08/23Vision Transformers part II (Slides)David BlackwellKatie Awty-Carroll
07/08/23Vision Transformers part I (Slides)David BlackwellKatie Awty-Carroll, Ryan Chan
24/07/23GPT: Pretraining Decoders (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
10/07/23BERT: Masked Language modelling and Pre-training (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
26/06/23Attention (continued) (Slides) & Transformer Encoder and Decoders (Slides)David BlackwellMartin Stoffel, Ryan Chan
31/05/23Reginald overview & Attention and self-attention networks (Notebook)David BlackwellEvelina Gabasova, Martin Stoffel
15/05/23Hands-on RNN/LSTM session (Materials)David BlackwellNathan Simpson, Levan Bokeria, David Llewellyn-Jones
03/05/23Sequence-to-sequence models part II: Encoder-decoder models (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
17/04/23Sequence-to-sequence models part I: RNNs/LSTMs (Slides)David BlackwellRyan Chan
03/04/23Deep Learning Basics (Slides)David BlackwellPhil Swatton, Jack Roberts
20/03/23Introduction to word embeddings and language modelling (Slides)David BlackwellFede Nanni

Background

The reading group originated from the Research Engineering Team's reading group on Transformers. Between 2023 and 2025, it was co-organised by Ryan Chan and Fede Nanni, with the help of Giulia Occhini.

deep-learning
diffusion-models
foundation-model
hut23
language-models
large-language-models
machine-learning
nlp
transformers

Contributors

rchan26

218 commits

fedenanni

80 commits

jack89roberts

8 commits

llewelld

7 commits

Languages

Jupyter Notebook

96.3%

TeX

3.7%