Karolina Drożdż Wins UvA Thesis Prize 2026

Karolina Drożdż, a PhD student at the University of Warsaw within the ELLIS PhD & Postdoc Program and a researcher at IDEAS Research Institute, has won the main prize in the University of Amsterdam’s UvA Thesis Prize 2026 competition.

Her master’s research examines how language models track objects, their properties, and their locations as a narrative unfolds. The findings help shed light on the models’ ability to process and maintain information throughout a text.

The study shows that object-tracking capabilities emerge in relatively small language models, with as few as 410 million parameters. Larger models outperform human participants on the specific task examined in the study.

Karolina also presented her findings at EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, one of the leading international conferences on natural language processing.