|
Steffen Backmann
I'm a Senior Member of Technical Staff at
Oracle Labs in Zürich,
where I work on LLM agents: building multi-agent applications for real-world use cases,
contributing to the open-source frameworks that
execute and
specify them, and making LLM workloads run
safely and efficiently inside the database.
My research interests also lie in the behaviour of LLM agents, particularly when objectives, incentives,
and moral commitments come into conflict. At ETH Zürich and in
collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, I
worked with Prof. Zhijing Jin and Prof.
Bernhard Schölkopf to study what
agents actually do when moral commitments and payoffs pull in opposite directions. I completed my
M.Sc. in Computer Science there, focusing on Machine Intelligence and Software Systems.
Before ETH, I studied Information Systems at University
of Münster. Before university, I completed an apprenticeship in agriculture—which is also
where my interest in renewable energy and anything outdoors comes from.
Email ::
CV ::
GitHub ::
LinkedIn
|
|
Research
I'm interested in how LLM agents behave once they are given stakes: how they decide when incentives
conflict with norms, how to evaluate that behaviour in a way that actually measures something, and
how to build agentic systems that are reliable enough to put in front of users.
|
|
When Ethics and Payoffs Diverge: LLM Agents in Morally Charged Social
Dilemmas
Steffen Backmann, David Guzman Piedrahita, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Emanuel Tewolde, Rada
Mihalcea, Bernhard Schölkopf, Zhijing Jin
arXiv preprint, 2025
M.Sc. thesis, ETH Zürich
paper ::
code
A benchmark for evaluating the ethical alignment of LLM agents when moral imperatives conflict with
profit incentives. It embeds the prisoner's dilemma and public goods game in morally charged
contexts, varying moral framing, opponent behaviour and survival pressure across nine models, and
estimates each factor's causal effect while analysing motives in agents' reasoning traces. No model
remains consistently moral; game structure and moral framing are the strongest drivers, exposing the
situational brittleness of current models.
|
|
Beyond Binary Selection: Exploring Soft Masking Techniques for Language Model
Explainability
Collaboration with the ETH IVIA Lab,
2024
report ::
code
Evaluating a feature-attribution method usually means deleting the tokens it deems unimportant,
which pushes the input off-distribution and throws away the nuance in the scores. We instead replace
those tokens with plausible substitutes found through Gemma embeddings and faiss similarity search,
so an explanation reflects the attribution scores it came from.
|
|
Oracle Labs,
Zürich
Senior Member of Technical Staff
October 2026 – present
Member of Technical Staff
September 2025 – October 2026
Research Assistant
July 2024 – December 2024
Research on bringing AI capabilities into Oracle Database. Designed and built a multi-agent LLM
application that automates financial investigations (patent submitted), and contribute to
WayFlow and
Agent Spec, Oracle's open-source frameworks for
executing and specifying LLM agents.
|
|
Porsche AG, Stuttgart
Data Science Intern, Financial Strategy and Data Science
January 2022 – April 2022
Built and deployed a model for automated processing of transaction confirmation PDFs, and
prototyped an entity resolution solution matching bolted joints across different production manuals.
|
|
Silke & Christian Dohrmann GbR, Steyerberg
Agricultural vocational education (apprenticeship)
August 2017 – March 2019
Worked independently across plant production, machine operation and livestock, and was involved in
planning and implementing renewable energy projects (wind, solar, biogas).
|
|
ETH Zürich
M.Sc. Computer Science — GPA 5.6/6
Major: Machine Intelligence, Minor: Software Systems
September 2022 – August 2025
Coursework in Probabilistic AI, Machine Perception, Design of Parallel and High-Performance
Computing, Interactive Machine Learning, and Reliable and Trustworthy AI.
|
|
University of Münster
B.Sc. Information Systems — GPA 1.0 (German scale) / 4.0 (US), rank 1 of 234
October 2019 – August 2022
Coursework in Deep Learning, Operations Research and Optimization, and Data Analysis &
Simulation. Spent an exchange term at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, Canada.
|
Selected Projects
Course projects, side projects and unpublished research work.
|
|
Instance Segmentation of Trees in Satellite Data
B.Sc. thesis, University of Münster, 2022
code ::
thesis
A pipeline for instance segmentation of individual trees in Rwandan satellite imagery, comparing
Mask R-CNN and Cascade Mask R-CNN in PyTorch and MMDetection, from tiling and annotation handling
through to evaluation on held-out regions.
|
|
Benchmarking CUDA in Julia vs. CUDA in C
Course project with the ETH SPC Lab,
2023
code ::
report
Implemented and tuned kernels for a set of PolyBench-style benchmarks in both CUDA C and CUDA Julia,
then measured where Julia's abstractions cost performance on GPU and where they don't.
|
|
Interactive Visualizations of GNN Explainability Methods
Course project, ETH Zürich, 2023
code ::
report
A React and Spark application for comparing Graph Neural Network explainability methods on a
molecule toxicology dataset. Domain experts can interact with the molecule graph, reassign edge
explanation weights by hand, and watch the resulting metrics recompute on the fly.
|
|