Dr. Philipp Altmann

Dr. Philipp Altmann Dr. Philipp Altmann

Summary

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  • Research associate at LMU Munich focusing on alignment in collective intelligence and reinforcement learning. Experienced in leading interdisciplinary AI projects and publishing research that bridges theory and application. Passionate about robust, interpretable, and aligned learning systems in agentic and human-in-the-loop settings.

    • Education

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  • Dr. rer. nat. (PhD) Computer Science, LMU Munich (2020 – 2026)
  • M.Sc. Computer Science, LMU Munich (2018 – 2020)
  • B.Sc. Media Informatics, LMU Munich (2014 – 2018)
  • Abitur, Otfried-Preußler-Gymnasium Pullach (2006 – 2014)

    • Professional Experience

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  • Research Associate, LMU Munich (2020 – present)
  • Research Assistant, LMU Munich (2019 – 2020)
  • Web Developer, Polyteia, Munich (2017 – 2018)
  • Working Student, Ray Sono, Munich (2015 – 2017)

    • Research Interests

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  • Alignment in Mixed Collectives and Hybrid Intelligence (2020 – present)
  • Incentive Design and Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems [altmann2026drive,koelle2025pimaex,altmann2025mediate,phan2024mate,koelle2023learning,phan2022mate]
  • Interpretable and Human-Aligned RL [altmann2026react,altmann2024react,altmann2024emergence]
  • Reinforcement Learning and Agentic Systems (2018 – present)
  • Representation and Reward Modeling in RL [altmann2025direct,nuesslein2025swarm,altmann2023crop,phan2023aerial,altmann2023direct,phan2021vast]
  • Applied RL and Agentic Systems [stenzel2025seqym,zorn2024cohesive,altmann2024challenges,altmann2024qcd,koelle2024rlqc]
  • AI for Scientific Discovery and Quantum Computing (2018 – present)
  • Automated Quantum Circuit Design and Optimization [zorn2026representation,koelle2026qmlas,suenkel2025eaqcd,koelle2026qlth,zorn2025quality,koelle2025architectural,koelle2024optimizing,koelle2024maeqrl]
  • Hybrid Quantum-Classical Learning Systems [rohe2026detrimental,koelle2025qtl,suenkel2024qtl,koelle2024qppo,suenkel2024qfl,stein2024surrogate,koelle2024disentangling,koelle2024qaac,suenkel2023hybrid,schuman2023qbm,altmann2023sequent]
  • Evolutionary Search and Surrogate Modeling in Learning Systems [schoenberger2025sltnga,altmann2024finding,zorn2024final,zorn2024self,stenzel2024aculture,gabor2019benchmarking]

    • Research Highlights

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  • Publication Statistics (as of July 2026): 457 Citations, h-Index: 13, i10-Index: 17

    • Honors and Awards

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  • Gold Reviewer (Top 25%) International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2026)
  • Best Poster Award for our paper “Finding Strong Lottery Ticket Networks with Genetic Algorithms” and invitation to submit an extended version to Studies in Computational Intelligence. (IJCCI 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “REACT: Revealing Evolutionary Action Consequence Trajectories for Interpretable Reinforcement Learning” to Springer Nature Computer Science. (IJCCI 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “Disentangling Quantum and Classical Contributions in Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Architectures” to Springer LNAI. (ICAART 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “Improving Parameter Training for VQEs by Sequential Hamiltonian Assembly” to Springer LNAI. (ICAART 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “Multi-Agent Quantum Reinforcement Learning Using Evolutionary Optimization” to Springer LNAI. (ICAART 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “DIRECT: Learning from Sparse and Shifting Rewards using Discriminative Reward Co-Training” to Neural Computing and Applications. (ALA@AAMAS2023)
  • Premier Paper Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “Emergent Cooperation from Mutual Acknowledgment Exchange” to Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. (AAMAS 2022)
  • Highlight Paper Recognition of our AAMAS 2022 paper “Emergent Cooperation from Mutual Acknowledgment Exchange” at the IJCAI 2022 Workshop on Ad Hoc Teamwork. (WAHT@IJCAI 2022)
  • Gold Reviewer (Top 25%) International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2026)
  • Best Poster Award for our paper “Finding Strong Lottery Ticket Networks with Genetic Algorithms” and invitation to submit an extended version to Studies in Computational Intelligence. (IJCCI 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “REACT: Revealing Evolutionary Action Consequence Trajectories for Interpretable Reinforcement Learning” to Springer Nature Computer Science. (IJCCI 2024)
  • Paper Selection Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “DIRECT: Learning from Sparse and Shifting Rewards using Discriminative Reward Co-Training” to Neural Computing and Applications. (ALA@AAMAS2023)
  • Premier Paper Invitation to submit an extended version of our paper “Emergent Cooperation from Mutual Acknowledgment Exchange” to Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. (AAMAS 2022)
  • Highlight Paper Recognition of our AAMAS 2022 paper “Emergent Cooperation from Mutual Acknowledgment Exchange” at the IJCAI 2022 Workshop on Ad Hoc Teamwork. (WAHT@IJCAI 2022)

    • Project Experience

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  • Munich Quantum Valley (MQV) (2021 – present)
  • Promote quantum science and technologies to develop and operate competitive quantum computers.
  • Funding: Bavarian state government with funds from the Hightech Agenda Bayern.
  • Partner: BAdW, DLR, FhG, FAU, MPG, TUM. Role: Principal Investigator.
  • AI-Fusion: Evaluation of Emergence in Distributed AI Systems (2022 – 2024)
  • Transferring safe intelligence from research to application.
  • Funding: Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development, and Energy.
  • Partner: Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems.
  • QAR-Lab: Quantum Applications and Research Laboratory (2021 – 2022)
  • Building a Bavarian ecosystem for quantum computing and user expertise.
  • Funding: Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development, and Energy.
  • PlanQK: Platform and Ecosystem for Quantum-Assisted Artificial Intelligence (2020 – 2022)
  • Create a technical basis for knowledge and technology exchange on quantum-assisted AI.
  • Funding: Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
  • InnoMI – Innovation Center Mobile Internet (2020 – 2022)
  • Research on innovative mobile and distributed systems.
  • Funding: Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development, and Energy.

    • Teaching Experience

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  • Working Group Artificial Intelligence (2023 – present)
  • Weekly exchange and supervision of research projects across computational intelligence, RL, MAS, and QML.
  • Voluntary additional module, supervision of 8–12 students per semester supporting their thesis projects.
  • Practical Course Autonomous Systems (2022 – 2025)
  • Lectures on RL and autonomous decision-making (policy optimization, reward design, exploration strategies).
  • Supervised project-based development of continuous-control and embodied learning systems evaluated under uncertainty, including Unity-based autonomous driving agents and MuJoCo-based robotic grasping environments.
  • Guided 16–24 students per semester (teams of 3–5) in designing, training, and evaluating autonomous agents, with emphasis on scalable experimentation, modular environment design, and robust performance assessment.
  • Practical Course Affective Computing [Full List of Projects] (2021 – 2026)
  • Hands-on course on multimodal and human-centered machine learning (vision, speech, emotion, and physiological signals).
  • Supervised 100+ students across 30+ projects developing end-to-end affect-aware systems, including multimodal sentiment extraction, emotion-conditioned generation, recommender systems, assistive technology, and healthcare applications.
  • Guided students in integrating deep learning and foundation models (LLMs/VLMs) into agentic and multimodal pipelines (e.g., zero-shot music recommendation, empathetic voicebots, intention prediction, and real-time safety monitoring).
  • Thesis and Seminar Supervision (2020 – present)
  • 12 master seminar papers, 27 bachelor seminar papers, 13 master theses, and 18 bachelor theses [Full List of Theses]
  • Topics include preference-based & reward-free RL; curriculum design; multi-objective & diversity-driven policy optimization; explainability & interpretability; cooperative MARL & meta-reward design; LLM evaluation & evolutionary prompt search; vision-based robotic grasping & embodied RL; hybrid QML; pruning of LLMs & ANNs; AI for scientific discovery.

    • Volunteer Work and Activities

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  • Head of Office, Digitale Stadt München e.V. (2021 – present)
  • Festival Booking and Artist Relations, Kulturspektakel Gauting e.V. (2017 – present)
  • Bartender for events and concerts (since 2019 in managerial position) (2015 – 2024)

    • Professional Services

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  • Program Committee: AAAI, ACII, ALA, IJCAI, GECCO, QAIO
  • Reviewer: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, ICLR, ICML, Nature Communications Physics, Neural Computing and Applications, NeurIPS, RLC, SN Computer Science, TMLR
  • Reviewer, Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2026)
  • Reviewer, 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
  • Reviewer, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (2026)
  • Reviewer, 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026)
  • Reviewer, 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
  • Program Committee, 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
  • Reviewer, Nature Communications Physics (since 2025)
  • Reviewer, 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
  • Program Committee, 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025)
  • Reviewer, 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)
  • Program Committee, 17th Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA 2025)
  • Program Committee, 27th Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2025)
  • Program Committee, 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025)
  • Program Committee, 1st Quantum Artificial Intelligence and Optimization (QAIO2025)
  • Reviewer, 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)
  • Program Committee, 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)
  • Reviewer, 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)
  • Reviewer, 1st Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC 2024)
  • Program Committee, 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024)
  • Reviewer, 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)
  • Reviewer, Neural Computing and Applications (since 2024)
  • Reviewer, Springer Nature Computer Science (since 2024)
  • Reviewer, 12th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024)
  • Reviewer, 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)
  • Program Committee, 31st International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2023)

    • Talks

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  • “Surrogate Modelling for Collective Intelligence,” Doctoral Seminar, Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, LMU Munich. (2025)
  • “Distributional Shift Robust Reinforcement Learning,” #WeAreExperts Tech Talk @ Fraunhofer IKS. (2024)
  • “Meta Heuristics for Quantum Circuit Design,” Munich Quantum Software Stack Exchange Meeting. (2024)
  • “REACT: Revealing Evolutionary Action Consequence Trajectories for Interpretable Reinforcement Learning,” virtual paper presentation at the 16th International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications at IJCCI. (2024)
  • “Emergence in Multi-Agent Systems - A Safety Perspective,” oral paper presentation at the Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems (REOCAS) track at ISoLA. (2024)
  • “SEGym: Optimizing Large Language Model Assisted Software Engineering Agents with Reinforcement Learning,” oral paper presentation at the AI Assisted Programming track at AISoLA. (2024)
  • “CROP: Towards Distributional-Shift Robust Reinforcement Learning Using Compact Reshaped Observation Processing,” virtual paper presentation at the main track at IJCAI. (2023)
  • “DIRECT: Learning from Sparse and Shifting Rewards using Discriminative Reward Co-Training,” oral paper presentation at the 15th Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop at AAMAS. (2023)

    • Media Coverage

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  • “Essentially, it’s about aligning different modalities,“ MQV in Persona research portrait. (2026)

    • Skills

    [Collapse]     PythonC++GoJavaScriptPyTorchTensorFlowNumpyGymnasiumMuJoCoDockerGitLLMsLaTeXUnityBlenderIllustratorExperiment DesignScientific WritingData AnalysisProject ManagementSupervision & MentoringTeachingCross-Disciplinary CollaborationPeer Reviewing
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