Pablo J. Diego Simón

Pablo J. Diego Simón

I am a PhD researcher and AI4theSciences / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, under the supervision of Emmanuel Chemla, Jean-Rémi King, and Yair Lakretz.

I work at the intersection of deep learning and computational neuroscience, studying the geometry and dynamics of linguistic representations in self-supervised models, particularly large language models.

In 2026, I joined Paradigms of Intelligence at Google Research as a Research Scientist Intern, under the supervision of Eyvind Niklasson. My work focused on world models and self-organized systems.

Previously, I completed my MSc and BSc in Biomedical Engineering at ETH Zürich and URJC, respectively.

Pablo J. Diego Simón

Publications

selected & recent
2026

Learning local universes: Neural Cellular Automata as decentralized world models

Pablo J. Diego-Simón, Eyvind Niklasson

Paradigms of Intelligence · Google Research

2026

Polar probe linearly decodes semantic structures from LLMs

Pablo J. Diego-Simón, Pierre Orhan, Emmanuel Chemla, Yair Lakretz, Jean-Rémi King

3rd Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2026)

2026

Emergence of Phonemic, Syntactic, and Semantic Representations in Artificial Neural Networks

Pierre Orhan, Pablo J. Diego-Simón, Emmanuel Chemla, Yair Lakretz, Yves Boubenec, Jean-Rémi King

Preprint

2025

Probing Syntax in Large Language Models: Successes and Remaining Challenges

Pablo J. Diego-Simón, Emmanuel Chemla, Jean-Rémi King, Yair Lakretz

2nd Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2025)

2024

A Polar Coordinate System Represents Syntax in Language Models

Pablo J. Diego-Simón, Stéphane D'Ascoli, Emmanuel Chemla, Yair Lakretz, Jean-Rémi King

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024)

2023

XLS-R fine-tuning on noisy word boundaries for unsupervised speech segmentation into words

Robin Jonathan Algayres, Pablo J. Diego-Simón, Benoît Sagot, Emmanuel Dupoux

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Experience

2026
Research Scientist Intern
Paradigms of Intelligence, Google Research · Zürich
2022–23
Research Intern
Cognitive Machine Learning Lab, École Normale Supérieure · Paris
2022
Research Collaborator
Google Research · Zürich

Education

2023–
PhD · Deep Learning & Computational Neuroscience
École Normale Supérieure · Paris
2021–23
MSc · Biomedical Engineering
ETH Zürich
2017–21
BSc · Biomedical Engineering
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos · Madrid

Also

2026
Lecturer, Advanced Data Analysis
ENS Ulm · Paris

Music and Places

I grew up in Brussels and have since lived in Madrid, Zürich and Paris, with Salamanca always being my hometown. Music has been a constant along the way, and some albums have become inseparable from particular places and moments.

Records and places

Salamanca · Brussels · Madrid · Zürich · Paris

Vinyl corner (Work In Progress)

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