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carelvniekerk/README.md

Carel van Niekerk

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Hi there 👋

I am a Research Scientist/Engineer specialising in Reinforcement Learning (RL) Post-training, LLM Alignment, and Uncertainty Quantification. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf. I have over 10 years of experience across academia, recently completing my PhD (magna cum laude) with a focus on uncertainty-aware decision-making. My goal is to build trustworthy, scalable, and agentic AI systems.

🎯 Interests

  • Reinforcement Learning for LLMs and Agentic LLMs: using intrinsic reward via model confidence for improved performance, calibration and reliability.
  • Uncertainty in Large Language Models: techniques for estimating and mitigating uncertainty to enhance model trustworthiness and decision-making.
  • Agentic LLMs: development of autonomous AI agents leveraging LLM capabilities for complex task execution.
  • Dialogue Systems & NLP: ConvLab 3 toolkit, unified data formats, state tracking, production-ready pipelines.

🛠 Tech Stack

🌍 Languages

📚 Selected Publications

📂 Notable Projects

  • RLSF-LLM: Self-supervised RL post-training pipelines for LLMs, using intrinsic confidence-based rewards.
  • ConvLab 3: Unified data format, improved state-tracking and Reinforcement learning tools.

Last updated: 2025-11-10

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