Machine Intelligence Lab

Welcome to the website of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). We are part of the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence and the Intelligent Systems Group.

PhD Studentship Opportunities

Our lab is offering three PhD projects as a part of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber-Physical Risk. The projects are the following:

  • “Attack and Defence of Cyber-physical Systems Relying on Multimodal Foundational Models”;
  • “Hybrid Risks in Agentic AI Ecosystems”;
  • “Securing Cyber-physical Systems Against Cyber-attacks: A Hybrid Network Modelling Approach”.

You can find more information about the projects here. Please do not hesitate to contact Professor Mirco Musolesi by email to arrange an informal chat.

Closing application deadline: 15 February 2026.

What’s New

  • December 2025 Our paper “DiffSampling: Enhancing Diversity and Accuracy in Neural Text Generation” has been accepted in Transactions on Machine Learning Research. The camera ready version of the paper will appear soon. In the meantime, you can download the paper here.

  • December 2025 New preprint: “Understanding Individual Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: A Dynamical Systems Approach”. You can download the paper here.

  • November 2025 During the past year, we have been involved in the OECD Working Group on AI and the Future of Skills. The current goal of the Working Group is to devise a series of metrics to quantify AI capabilities. In essence, the question is how to assess the extent to which an AI system can perform a given task with a level of proficiency comparable to that of humans. The OECD AI Capability Indicators Technical Report has now been published and is available here. The website of the OECD AI Capability Indicators is available here.

  • October 2025 Our paper “Heterogeneous Knowledge for Augmented Modular Reinforcement Learning” has been accepted in Transactions on Machine Learning Research The camera ready version of the paper will appear soon. In the meantime, you can download the paper here.

  • October 2025 We won the ACM UbiComp 10-Year Impact Award for our paper “Trajectories of Depression: Unobtrusive Monitoring of Depressive States by means of Smartphone Mobility Traces Analysis”. Our 2015 paper can be downloaded here.

  • October 2025 New preprint: “Opponent Shaping in LLM Agents”. You can download the paper here.

  • October 2025 New preprint: “A Generalized Information Bottleneck Theory of Deep Learning”. You can download the paper here.

  • September 2025 New preprint: “Complexity-Driven Policy Optimization”. You can download the paper here.

  • August 2025 Our paper “Maynard Smith Revisited: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Coevolution of Signalling Behaviour” has been published in PLOS Computational Biology. You can download the paper here.

  • August 2025 Our paper “(Ir)rationality in AI: State of the Art, Research Challenges and Open Questions” has been published in Artificial Intelligence Review. You can download the paper here.

  • August 2025 Our paper “Feature Selection for Network Intrusion Detection” will be presented in the Research Track of the 31st ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD 2025). You can download the paper here.

  • May 2025 New preprint: “Reward Model Overoptimisation in Iterated RLHF”. You can download the paper here.

  • May 2025 Congratulations to Liza Tennant for successfully defending her thesis on “Moral Alignment of Agentic AI Systems”!

  • April 2025 Liza Tennant will present her work “Moral Alignment for LLM Agents” at 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025). You can download the paper here.

Previous news items can be found here.

Joining and Collaborating with the Lab

The lab welcomes applications from prospective PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, research interns, and visiting scholars.

We are open to collaboration with academic, industry and government partners in our areas of expertise.

More details can be found here.



Last updated: 31 December 2025.