Anna Penzkofer
PhD Candidate. University of Stuttgart. Collaborative Artificial Intelligence (CAI).

Hi, my name is Anna. I’m a PhD student at University of Stuttgart at the Institute for visualization and interactive systems (VIS), affiliated with the collaborative artificial intelligence group. I’ve been doing research since my bachelor’s degree at Stuttgart in 2018, where I published my first paper at ICMI’21.
My personal research goal is understanding and developing a biologically plausible model of human visual processing, from bottom-up vision to spatial and abstract reasoning on natural images. I am particularly interested in integrating cognitive models with machine learning methods.
I regularly work with vision-language models for tasks such as object detection, or visual question answering. Additionally, I am interested in reinforcement learning agents and their strong link to human adaptive learning processes.
If you’re interested in a master/bachelor thesis with us, check out our projects page.
news
Jul 30, 2025 | Excited to participate remotely and present my poster at CogSci’25. |
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May 01, 2025 | Starting my internship at the Computational Neuroscience Research Group (CNRG) @ University of Waterloo, Canada. |
Apr 05, 2025 | My new paper A Cognitively Plausible Visual Working Memory Model has been accepted at CogSci’25 |
Apr 03, 2025 | I offered a workshop on Machine Learning for Girls' Day 2025 |
Mar 01, 2025 | I’m happy to review 4 papers for CogSci 2025. |
selected publications
2025
2024
2021
