Daniel Kaiser
CV

I study reasoning in language models.

PhD Fellow at Integreat and UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

Before that an MSc by Research at Oxford on an Oxford-Man Institute scholarship, a BSc at WU Vienna, and six years in quantitative finance and machine learning engineering in Zurich.

PhD ends in 2027. Open to research visits in spring 2027 and to postdoc and research roles from autumn 2027. Get in touch

Physarum polycephalum, live. It keeps the paths that pay off and withdraws from the rest. No brain involved. Up to 560,000 agents on your GPU. How it works Lab

Research

  1. Tokens saved within half an accuracy point of always-high effort: 17.8 percent with one setting per benchmark, 19.2 with text forecasts, 43.8 with per-question oracle-like choice Tokens saved vs. always-high, within 0.5 accuracy points always high effort reference one setting per benchmark −17.8% + forecasts from question text −19.2% per question, oracle-like −43.8% what forecasts miss
    When Is More Reasoning Worth It?
  2. Relative cost of Qwen3.5-27B against GPT-OSS-120B on ZebraLogic reverses from 4.49 times at low workload to 0.78 times at high workload 0.5× 1× 2× 4× equal cost 4.49× 0.78× low workload high workload Tokens: Qwen3.5-27B ÷ GPT-OSS-120B, ZebraLogic
    Beyond Accuracy
  3. Fitted accuracy against task length for four reasoning models on CogniLoad 20 50 100 250 050100 Statements N (log) % correct, fitted GPT-5 Qwen3-8B Qwen3-32B DeepSeek-R1
    CogniLoad

2026

When Is More Reasoning Worth It?

Under review, with Benjamin Ricaud

Nine open models answered every question at every effort setting, 597,744 scored responses in all. An oracle choosing effort per question would save 43.8% of tokens within half an accuracy point of always thinking hard.

Essays and experiments

Background

  1. 2024 – PhD Fellow, Machine Learning Integreat and UiT
  2. 2022 – 24 Machine learning and data engineering Orderfox, CH Media and Smallpdf, Zurich
  3. 2020 – 21 Quant Rothschild & Co, Zurich
  4. 2019 – 20 ML Research Scientist avax / Deep Impact, Winterthur
  5. 2018 – 20 MSc by Research, Engineering Science University of Oxford
  6. 2014 – 17 BSc Economics WU Vienna