Research
My current research focuses on the foundations of generative AI and large language modeling, with an emphasis on AI-generated text and code detection, freshness and temporal reasoning, RL scaling, and Agents. The work from my teams and I have contributed to some of Google’s most significant products, including Gemini and Search.
To get a technical sense of my research, see my Scholar profile or my CV. Below are some selected recent publications and links to articles and videos that provide a broader perspective on the impact of the research.
Selected Recent Publications
- Gemini Team. “Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities,” arXiv, 2025.
- Balog, K., Metzler, D., and Qin, Z. “Rankers, Judges, and Assistants: Towards Understanding the Interplay of LLMs in Information Retrieval Evaluation,” in SIGIR, 2025.
- Baumgärtner, T., Gao, Y., Alon, D., and Metzler, D. “Best-of-Venom: Attacking RLHF by Injecting Poisoned Preference Data,” in COLM, 2024.
- Gao, Y., Alon, D., and Metzler, D. “Impact of Preference Noise on the Alignment Performance of Generative Language Models,” in COLM, 2024.
- Qin, Z., Jagerman, R., Hui, K., et al. “Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting,” in Findings of NAACL, 2024.
- Pradeep, R., Hui, K., Gupta, J., et al. “How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?,” in EMNLP, 2023.
Articles
- March 2025: Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model (The Keyword)
- March 2024: New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search (The Keyword)
- March 2024: Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results (The Verge)
- September 2023: Improving Trust in AI and Online Communities with PaLM-based Moderation (Google Cloud Blog)
- July 2023: Google’s Jigsaw was trying to fight toxic speech with AI. Then the AI started talking (Fast Company)
- June 2021: Google Hopes AI Can Turn Search Into a Conversation (Wired)
- May 2021: Google isn’t ready to turn search into a conversation (The Verge)
- May 2021: Language models like GPT-3 could herald a new type of search engine (MIT Technology Review)
Blog Posts
- December 2022: Accelerating text generation with Confident Adaptive Language Modeling (CALM) (Google Research Blog)
- October 2022: UL2 20B: An Open Source Unified Language Learner (Google Research Blog)
YouTube Videos
- April 2022: Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index (Machine Learning Research Paper Explained) (Yannic Kilcher YouTube Video)
- November 2021: ExT5: Towards Extreme Multi-Task Scaling for Transfer Learning (Paper Explained) (Yannic Kilcher YouTube Video)