Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga

Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga

JRF @ Oxford | PhD @ Cambridge

Welcome to my site! I am a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) in Computer Science at Trinity College, Oxford. I also hold visiting research positions at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Prior to these positions, I did a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, where I was lucky to be supervised by Mateja Jamnik and was supported by a Gates Cambridge scholarship. As part of my research, I am interested in understanding how AI model interpretability can be used to provide feedback to these models and, equivalently, be used by the models to also ask for help. This has led me to explore so-called concept-based interpretability and its wider applications to human-in-the-loop systems. If you would like to read more about this, please take a look at my research page.

If you want to know more about my research or myself, feel free to shoot me an email with any questions and/or good jokes you may have! I am always happy to chat.

Recent News

[December 2025] I passed my PhD's defense (viva voce) without corrections!
[November 2025] I started a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in Computer Science at Trinity College, Oxford.
[August 2025] Pietro Barbiero and I will be giving a talk on "Foundations of Interpretable Models" at the Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School. This talk will be based on this paper!
[July 2025] I will be in Vancouver for ICML 2025 presenting two papers [1, 2]!
[February 2025] I will be co-presenting a tutorial on Concept-based Interpretable Deep Learning at AAAI 2025. Come by if you are around!
[January 2025] We started a new online blog series and library (PyC) on Concept Learning. Check it out here!
[January 2025] Our work on Causal Concept Graph Models, lead by my amazing collaborators Gabriele Dominici and Pietro Barbiero, was accepted at ICLR 2025!
[October 2024] Our work on unsupervised bias mitigation was accepted at ECCV 2024 as an oral and nominated as Best Paper (within the top 15 papers)!
[August 2024] Our workshop on Human-Interpretable AI was accepted at KDD 2024.
[July 2024] One paper accepted at ICML 2024 where I will also be a co-organizer of the LatinX in AI (LXAI) Affinity Workshop.
[January 2024] Joined The Alan Turing Institute as a PhD enrichment student.
[October 2023] Joined Sony AI's AI Ethics team as a research intern.
[September 2023] Our Intervention-aware Concept Embedding Model (IntCEM) paper was accepted at NeurIPS 2023 as a spotlight (top ~3.06% of papers)!
[July 2023] Our Tabular Concept Bottleneck Model (TabCBM) paper was accepted at Transactions of Machine Learning Research (TMLR) and at ICML's 3rd Workshop on Interpretable Machine Learning in Healthcare (IMLH)
[April 2023] Our Deep Concept Reasoner (DCR) paper was accepted at ICML 2023 and at ICML's Differentiable Almost Everything Workshop!
[March 2023] Our paper on the effect of uncertainty for concept interventions was accepted at the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES) 2023!
[November 2022] Our paper on metrics for measuring concept quality and leakage was accepted at AAAI 2023 as a spotlight presentation!
[September 2022] Our Concept Embedding Model (CEM) paper was accepted at NeurIPS 2022!
[December 2021] My MPhil thesis work was accepted at NeurIPS's Workshop on eXplainable AI approaches for debugging and diagnosis (XAI4Debugging@NeurIPS) as a spotlight presentation!
[June 2021] Awarded Gates Cambridge scholarship to study for a Computer Science PhD under the supervision of Professor Mateja Jamnik.
[June 2021] Graduated from my MPhil in Advanced Computer Science with distinction.
[October 2020] Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I moved to Cambridge, UK for an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory.
[July 2017] Joined Cerebras Systems as an early Machine Learning Engineer.
[June 2017] Completed my MEng in Computer Science from Cornell University graduating with the highest GPA of the cohort.
[December 2016] Completed my BA in Computer Science from Cornell University.

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