Bio

I am a MSCA Doctoral Fellow at Imperial College London, advised by Prof. Alessandra Russo. My research interests lie in generalist agents, world models, and AI safety. Previously, I worked at Microsoft AI on post-training Microsoft 365 Copilot for tool use and reasoning.

Before pursuing a PhD in AI, I co-founded Athina AI (YC W23), an LLM observability startup, and worked in machine learning roles at Turo, BMW, and Amazon. Please feel free to reach out if you share similar research interests or would like to discuss transitioning from the start-up world to a PhD.

Selected Publications & Preprints

Grounding Generated Videos in Feasible Plans via World Models.
C. Ziakas*, A. Bar, A. Russo.
Preprint (under review), 2026.

VITA: Zero-Shot Value Functions via Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models.
C. Ziakas*, A. Russo.
ICLR 2026.

Red-Bandit: Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Red-Teaming via Bandit-Guided LoRA Experts.
C. Ziakas*, N. Loo, N. Jain, A. Russo.
Preprint (under review), 2025.

Towards Shutdownable Agents via Stochastic Choice.
E. Thornley*, A. Roman*, C. Ziakas*, L. Ho, L. Thomson.
TMLR 2025.

For a full list, please visit Publications & Preprints page.

* indicates equal first authorship.