Work

I am an Assistant Professor at UBC. I work on Natural Language Processing and AI, and my research broadly studies the capabilities and limits of large language models (and other generative AI systems). Some of the things my lab is working on right now:

Exploring the ways that model capabilities may diverge from human intuitions, and ways that human intuitions don’t map well onto model use
Studying the ability of LLMs to be unpredictable/creative, which is required for things like providing novel responses, model-based simulations, and generally modeling text
Decoding-time algorithms to infuse models with algorithms and unlock capabilities without the need the for finetuning

While the popular view of LLMs is through the lens of engineering —how do we make models do what we want?— I tend to view them more through a natural sciences lens —what do models want to do in the first place? While they are clearly very useful, much of my work operates on the assumption that we really have very little idea what is contained in these models, and how it might differ from the human intelligence we are accustomed to. Many questions I am working to answer are related: Where do LLMs fail that humans succeed, and vice versa? Are compact/small-scale LLMs massively underestimated? How do current alignment techniques alter/degrade language understanding? etc.

Bio

I received my PhD from the University of Washington working with Yejin Choi, and my BSc from the University of British Columbia. I spent time as an intern at the Allen Institute for AI on the Mosaic team and Microsoft Research in the Natural Language Processing Group.

My work has been recognized with multiple awards, including best method paper at NAACL 2022, outstanding paper at ACL 2023, and outstanding paper at EMNLP 2023. I was also awarded the NSERC PGS-D fellowship which supported my PhD in part, and was recognized with an honorable mention for the NSF GRFP.

Outside of research, I love cooking, making bread, pasta, ice cream, and cocktails. I love movies of all kinds, and music.

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For Prospective Students/Researchers

My current work centres on the analysis, use, and limits of LLMs. See above for more details. If our interests might align, I encourage you to apply for a graduate position at UBC (Vancouver campus) Computer Science, in NLP/AI.Please mention me in your statement if you are interested in working together. I am planning to accept 1-2 students this year.

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If you are thinking of emailing me, there’s a good chance I won’t respond to:

requests for information available on this page (e.g., whether I am accepting students this year)
emails from prospective graduate students who I have not communicated with before
opportunities (e.g., research collaboration, publication editing, etc.) which are not reasonably close to my specific core research (see above)

This is not out of rudeness. I simply get too many emails like this to feasibly respond.

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News

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07/2025

Accepted at CoLM:

*Base Models Beat Aligned Models at Randomness and Creativity* (Paper)
*Visions of Language Modeling* (Workshop)

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07/2025

Lecture on Language Models at the AMII DLRL summer school

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03/2025

Invited talk at the TTIC NLP Seminar

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Research Group

Join

I am seeking curious minds to join me in exploring the mysteries of large language models and generative AI systems! See my bio above for more information.

Members

Peter West

PhD

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Kunal Samanta (incoming)

MSc

Benjamin Movassagh

Alexandrine Fortier

Hazel Chen (incoming)