Lennart Wachowiak

Lennart Wachowiak

PhD Candidate at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted Artificial Intelligence

King's College London

Imperial College London

Biography

I am a Cambridge ERA:AI research fellow working on human–AI interaction and decision-making. Previously, I was a PhD candidate with the CDT in Safe and Trusted AI at King’s College London and Imperial College London, and a student researcher at Google DeepMind, where I was part of the Gemini Robotics team.

Decision-Making. My current research focuses on how AI systems can help people make better decisions, especially in settings where other AIs may try to manipulate users into harmful choices. In particular, I study how an advisory AI can detect and counter manipulative or adversarial influence.

Explainability. During my PhD, I investigated how robots can learn to proactively explain their decisions and assist people in collaborative scenarios. I trained machine learning models to predict when explanations are needed and what they should be about by interpreting the user’s non-verbal behaviour and contextual task cues.

Cognitive Linguistics. I love interdisciplinary work, learning about different perspectives, and combining them to get a rich understanding of a phenomenon. Beyond my work in human–AI interaction, I study conceptual metaphors and image schemas in text corpora using tools from natural language processing and theories from cognitive linguistics.

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Work

  • Postdoctoral Researcher, Incoming

    University of Oxford

  • Technical AI Safety Fellow, 2026

    Cambridge ERA:AI

  • Student Researcher, 2024-2025

    Google DeepMind

Education

  • PhD in Safe and Trusted AI, 2021-2026

    King's College London, Imperial College London

  • MSc in Cognitive Science, 2018-2021

    Joint Degree with University of Vienna, University of Ljubljana, Comenius University Bratislava, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest

  • BSc in Computer Science, 2014-2017

    University of Paderborn

Research Areas

The research topics I investigated. Click on one for further information and corresponding publications.

Explainable Robotics
My PhD thesis focuses on explainable robotics. I develop user-centered and proactive explanations by allowing robots to consider a user’s mental state, inferred from social cues and task context.
Explainable Robotics
Conceptual Metaphors and Image Schemas
How can we identify and analyse conceptual metaphors and image schemas in natural language texts? In what contexts do people use them? What words and syntactic structures indicate them?
Conceptual Metaphors and Image Schemas
Extracting Terminological Concept Systems
How can we extract and organize domain-specific knowledge from multilingual text?
Extracting Terminological Concept Systems

Publications

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Coles, Oya Celiktutan, Gerard Canal (2026). Neurosymbolic Explanation Selection in Robotics: Combining the Strengths of Planning and Foundation Models for XAI. HRI Compendium.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Peter Tisnikar, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal, Matteo Leonetti, Oya Celiktutan (2025). Predicting When and What to Explain From Multimodal Eye Tracking and Task Signals. Transactions on Affective Computing.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Peter Tisnikar, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal, Oya Celiktutan (2024). A Time Series Classification Pipeline for Detecting Interaction Ruptures in HRI Based on User Reactions. ICMI.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Coles, Oya Celiktutan, Gerard Canal (2024). Are Large Language Models Aligned with People's Social Intuitions for Human-Robot Interactions?. IROS.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal, Oya Celiktutan (2024). A Taxonomy of Explanation Types and Need Indicators in Human–Agent Collaborations. Journal of Social Robotics.

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Philipp Wicke, Lennart Wachowiak (2024). Exploring Spatial Schema Intuitions in Large Language and Vision Models. ACL Findings.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Fenn, Haris Kamran, Oya Celiktutan, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal (2024). When Do People Want an Explanation from a Robot?. HRI.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann, Chao Xu (2023). The Image Schema VERTICALITY: Definitions and Annotation Guidelines. Image Schema Day.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann (2023). Does GPT-3 Grasp Metaphors? Identifying Metaphor Mappings with Generative Language Models. ACL.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Oya Celiktutan, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal (2023). A Survey of Evaluation Methods and Metrics for Explanations in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). ICRA Explainable Robotics Workshop.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann, Chao Xu (2022). Drum Up SUPPORT: Systematic Analysis of Image-Schematic Conceptual Metaphors. EMNLP Workshop FLP.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann (2022). Systematic Analysis of Image Schemas in Natural Language through Explainable Multilingual Neural Language Processing. COLING.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Peter Tisnikar, Gerard Canal, Andrew Coles, Matteo Leonetti, Oya Celiktutan (2022). Analysing Eye Gaze Patterns during Confusion and Errors in Human–Agent Collaborations. RO-MAN.

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Peter Tisnikar, Lennart Wachowiak, Gerard Canal, Andrew Coles, Matteo Leonetti, Oya Celiktutan (2022). Towards Autonomous Collaborative Robots that Adapt and Explain. ICRA Workshop on Prediction and Anticipation Reasoning in HRI.

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Dagmar Gromann, Lennart Wachowiak, Christian Lang, Barbara Heinisch (2022). Extracting Terminological Concept Systems from Natural Language Text. Cognitive Technologies.

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Christian Lang, Lennart Wachowiak, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2021). CogALex 2.0: Impact of Data Quality on Lexical-Semantic Relation Prediction. NeurIPS DCAI Workshop.

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Dagmar Gromann, Christian Lang, Lennart Wachowiak, Barbara Heinisch (2021). Multilingual Extraction of Terminological Concept Systems. Workshop on Deep Learning and Neural Approaches for Linguistic Data.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Christian Lang, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2021). Towards Learning Terminological Concept Systems from Multilingual Natural Language Text. Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (awarded best student paper).

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Christian Lang, Lennart Wachowiak, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2021). Transforming Term Extraction: Transformer-Based Approaches to Multilingual Term Extraction Across Domains. ACL Findings.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Christian Lang, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2020). CogALex-VI Shared Task: Transrelation - A Robust Multilingual Language Model for Multilingual Relation Identification. Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (1st place in CogALex shared task).

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Lennart Wachowiak (2020). Semi-automatic Extraction of Image Schemas from Natural Language. MEi:CogSci Conference.

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Rebecca Varga, Lennart Wachowiak (2019). Grounded Language Learning in Robots-An Information-Theoretic Approach to Adjective Learning. MEi:CogSci Conference.

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