Jannis Vamvas, PhD
Language AI Researcher at University of Zurich
Recent posts
Just Released: Machine Translation Engine for Romansh
Covering the six varieties of the Romansh language.
Read post
OpenAI's Speculative Decoding,
Reverse-Engineered
Why LLMs are faster if we give them a draft to complete.
Read postWenn ChatGPT den Smartvote-Fragebogen ausfüllt
Sind Sprachmodelle politisch voreingenommen?
Read postRecent publications
Jannis Vamvas, Ignacio Pérez Prat, Angela Heldstab, Dominic P. Fischer, Sina Ahmadi and Rico Sennrich. 2026. Translation Asymmetry in LLMs as a Data Augmentation Factor: A Case Study for 6 Romansh Language Varieties. Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. [cite] [data] [model] [code]
Michelle Wastl, Jannis Vamvas and Rico Sennrich. 2026. Scaling Unsupervised Word Alignment to Documents via Structural Constraints. Accepted to EMNLP 2026. [cite] [data] [code, code]
Hanxu Hu, Zdeněk Šnajdr, Pinzhen Chen, Jannis Vamvas and Rico Sennrich. 2026. Reinforcement Learning Elicits Contextual Learning of Unseen Language Translation. Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. [cite] [code]
Michelle Wastl, Jannis Vamvas and Rico Sennrich. 2026. SwissGov-RSD: A Human-annotated, Cross-lingual Benchmark for Token-level Recognition of Semantic Differences Between Related Documents. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 31134–31163, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics. [cite] [data] [code] ★ Selected as SAC Highlight
Apertus Team. 2026. Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 46877–46955, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics. [cite] [model]
Recent teaching
| Fall 2026 | Lecturer Fundamentals of Large Language Models |
| Fall 2026 | Lecturer Mathematical Foundations for Language Technology 1 |
| Fall 2026 | Co-instructor Ethics of AI for Language and Speech |
| Spring 2026 | Lecturer CAS Generative AI |
| Spring 2026 | Lecturer Text Generation with Language Models |