Dear all, We have an open PhD student position at the Chair for Natural Language Generation and Dialogue Systems (https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/ds/) at the University of Bamberg, Germany. We are looking for a talented talented researcher for a term of three years, starting either April 1 2027 or as soon as possible thereafter. Application deadline is 1 November 2026. **Topic description**: We aim to advance the controllability of large language models (LLMs) for everyday dialogue systems by discovering lightweight methods to steer LLMs without requiring full model access or costly internal modifications. We will investigate whether an LLM’s response can be shaped by control signals that follow a defined interaction pattern and how this interaction pattern can be learned. The work will explore prompt‑based and constraint‑decoding methods as well as reinforcement learning approaches. The full details can be found here: https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/ds/open-positions/ Applicants should have:

* Completed university degree (MSc or equivalent) with focus: computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, machine learning or comparable * Good proficiency in Python programming language * Ability to work in a highly analytical, structured, and autonomous fashion * Proficiency in English and at least basic knowledge of German is desired

If you would like to apply, please send your complete application including a brief letter of motivation (Why do you want to do a PhD? Why at the group?), your CV, your transcripts, contact details of two references and optionally your publication record as a single pdf file to applications.ds@uni-bamberg.de. Best regards, Stefan Ultes -- Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Ultes Natural Language Generation and Dialogue Systems

Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg Bamberg Center for Artificial Intelligence

phone: +49 (0) 951 863 2900 or +49 (0) 951 863 2901 (secretary) https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/ds