Theses

Our group has several open research projects that are suitable for a master (M), bachelor (B) or semester (S) theses. In addition, we have group projects, and labs for distributed systems majors; projects marked as B or S are usually also suitable for labs or group projects.

If you have an idea for a project that is not on our list but falls into our research area, we would be excited to hear about it.

	Title	Type	Contact/Supervisor	Assigned
Available Theses & Labs
	Abstract Reasoning Corpus (ARC) Challenge	M/S	Frédéric Berdoz	available
	Bring Your Own Algorithm	M/S	Andrei Constantinescu	available
	DeepEye: Eye Tracking with Deep Learning	B/M/S	Ard Kastrati	available
	Evaluating and Controlling the Political Bias of LLMs	M/S	Frédéric Berdoz	available
	Exceptional Students for ML in Audio/Music	B/M/S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	available
	Foundation Learning Models for Decoding Brain Activity	B/M/S	Ard Kastrati	available
	Karma Economics	M/S	Damien Berriaud	available
	Neural Fluid Simulation with GNNs	M/S	Joël Mathys, Florian Grötschla	available
	Recommender Systems for Politics	B/M/S	Frédéric Berdoz, Yann Vonlanthen	available
	Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning (RL4RL)	M/S	Benjamin Estermann	available
	Topics in Computational Voting and Game Theory	M/S	Andrei Constantinescu	available
Current Theses & Labs
	Title	Type	Contact/Supervisor	Assigned	Student(s)
	Adversarial examples and robust classifiers	M	Andreas Plesner	HS 24
	Anomaly Detection for Visual Inspection	M	Ioana Giurgiu	HS 24
	Asynchronous Cellular Automata	M	Florian Grötschla, Andreas Plesner	HS 24
	Automated Foosball Tracking	B	Joël Mathys, Till Aczél	HS 24
	Breaking Image CAPTCHAs and designing a new CAPTCHA	M	Andreas Plesner	HS 24
	DAO Governance Aggregation	B	Arthur Gervais	HS 24
	Egocentric Action Recognition	M	Ard Kastrati	HS 24
	Elucidating 2D NMR Spectra	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	HS 24
	Empirical Analysis of Prediction Markets	B	Lioba Heimbach, Quentin Kniep	HS 24
	Homo Moralis Plays a Game	B	Damien Berriaud, Andrei Constantinescu	HS 24
	Homo Moralis Plays a Game	M	Damien Berriaud, Andrei Constantinescu	HS 24
	LLMs for contract negotiation	M	Andreas Plesner	HS 24
	Order Book Reconstruction, Analysis, and Visualization	M	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 24
	Volatility Forecasting and Regime Detection for Options Trading	M	Frédéric Berdoz, Elio Delacour	HS 24
	Wave Function Collapse for Graph Generation	S	Till Aczél, Joël Mathys	HS 24
	AI-generated Yield Curves	M	Daniela Brauckhoff	FS 24
	Anomaly and vulnerability detection for smart contracts	M	Benjamin Estermann, Ye Wang	FS 24
	Benchmarking Pretrained EEG Models	B	Ard Kastrati	FS 24
	CLAPv2	M	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Compute-Efficient Pretraining of Large EEG Models	B	Ard Kastrati	FS 24
	Deep Dive Into Peer Discovery	M	Lucianna Kiffer, Yann Vonlanthen	FS 24
	Distributed Stable Matchings	M	Diana Ghinea, Andrei Constantinescu	FS 24
	EEG Codecs	S	Ard Kastrati, Luca Lanzendörfer	FS 24
	Evaluating Audio Metrics	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Game Theory for Games: Algorithms and Axioms	G	Andrei Constantinescu	FS 24
	GNNs for Supply Chain Networks	S	Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys	FS 24
	Graph Algorithms for Dynamic Directories	M	Andrei Constantinescu, Pankaj Khanchandani	FS 24
	Graph Neural Networks on Music Graphs	S	Florian Grötschla, Luca Lanzendörfer	FS 24
	Graphs in Medicine: Working with Blood Vessel Networks	M	Joël Mathys, Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Hierarchical Representations for Transformers	M	Benjamin Estermann	FS 24
	Immitating Byzantine Behavior in Distributed Systems	M	Yann Vonlanthen	FS 24
	Learning from Demonstrations	G	Benjamin Estermann	FS 24
	Lightning Network + GNNs	M	Florian Grötschla, Lioba Heimbach	FS 24
	Optimal Routing for 2D Mesh-based Analog Compute-In-Memory Accelerator Architecture	M	William Simon	FS 24
	Puzzle solving with Graph Neural Networks	S	Joël Mathys, Benjamin Estermann	FS 24
	State Replication on Demand	M	Yann Vonlanthen, Quentin Kniep	FS 24
	Stock Market Graphs	S	Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys	FS 24	,
	Structured Sparsity for Efficient Model Inference	S	Peter Belcák	FS 24
	The Emergence of Two-Party Systems	G	Andrei Constantinescu	FS 24
	Using PINNs to predict rail irregularities	M	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
Past Theses & Labs
	Title	Type	Contact/Supervisor	Assigned	Student(s)
	Symbolic Music Generation with Autoregressive Graph Autoencoder [confidential]	S	Florian Grötschla, Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 24
	Breaking Google’s reCAPTCHAv3 [confidential]	S	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Breaking Google’s reCAPTCHAv3 - Getting good cookies [confidential]	S	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Breaking Google’s reCAPTCHAv3 - How are humans classified [confidential]	S	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Building a Multi-Cryptocurrency Node Explorer	S	Lucianna Kiffer	FS 24
	Conditional Generation of Wavetables	B	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Improving the Data Quality of ConfSearch using LLMs	S	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Data Driven Anomaly Detection for Rails using In-service Railway Vehicles	B	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Data Driven Anomaly Detection of Springs in In-service Railway Vehicles [confidential]	B	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Hidden State Aggregation Models with GNN Convolutions Applied to Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting in Energy Markets [confidential]	M	Benjamin Estermann	FS 24
	Benchmarking Positional Encodings for GNNs [confidential]	S	Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Sybil Detection using Graph Neural Networks [confidential]	M	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Next Level Message-Passing with Hierarchical Support Graphs [confidential]	S	Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Incentivizing Simple Transactions [confidential]	B	Lioba Heimbach, Andrei Constantinescu	FS 24
	Infrastructure Impact on Cryptocurrency Networks	S	Lucianna Kiffer	FS 24
	Jigsaw Puzzle Solver using Machine Learning [confidential]	S	Andreas Plesner, Till Aczél	FS 24
	Reinforcement Learning for State-Based Algorithms on Graphs [confidential]	M	Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys	FS 24
	Leverage Staking using Liquid Staking Tokens [confidential]	B	Lioba Heimbach, Robin Fritsch	FS 24
	Contrastive Lyrics Alignment with a Timestamp-Informed Loss [confidential]	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Lyrics to Vocals Generation [confidential]	M	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	High-Fidelity Music Vocoder Using Neural Audio Codecs [confidential]	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	FunctaFormer: Domain Agnostic Super Resolution [confidential]	M	Luca Lanzendörfer, Benjamin Estermann	FS 24
	Solving Poisson Equations using Neural Walk-on-Spheres [confidential]	M	Anima Anandkumar	FS 24
	Open-LLark: Open-Sourcing And Extending LLark [confidential]	B	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Toward Robust Voting Advice Applications: Lessons from Smartvote [confidential]	M	Yann Vonlanthen, Frédéric Berdoz	FS 24
	Reconstructing ODEs for Railway Vehicles Using Machine Learning [confidential]	B	Andreas Plesner	FS 24
	Text-to-Speech Arena [confidential]	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 24
	Exploring Typical and Uncertainty-Driven Active Learning on DINO Embeddings to Enhance Versatility [confidential]	S	Till Aczél, Benjamin Estermann	HS 23
	AEye: A Visualization Tool for Image Datasets [confidential]	G	Florian Grötschla, Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	Airdrop Mechanisms and Their Sybil Resistance [confidential]	B	Lioba Heimbach, Yann Vonlanthen	HS 23
	Tokenization of Ethereum Stake [confidential]	S	Lucianna Kiffer, Lioba Heimbach	HS 23
	Object-Centric Reasoning with Language and Code [confidential]	G	Benjamin Estermann, Joël Mathys	HS 23
	Locating and Hiding Validators in the Ethereum Consensus Network [confidential]	M	Lucianna Kiffer, Yann Vonlanthen	HS 23
	Attacks on DAOs [confidential]	S	Lioba Heimbach, Yann Vonlanthen	HS 23
	Generative Musical Source Separation Based on Neural Audio Codecs [confidential]	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	HS 23
	Best Pokémon Team	B	Andreas Plesner	HS 23
	I’m a Robot. Solving CAPTCHAs with Advanced Machine Learning Techniques [confidential]	S	Andreas Plesner	HS 23
	Audio Data Visualization Using Text-Audio Embeddings [confidential]	B	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	HS 23
	Building Practical Distributed Algorithms	G	Yann Vonlanthen	HS 23	,
	Building Practical Longest Chain Protocols	G	Yann Vonlanthen	HS 23
	WikiGame: Graph-Exploration, Fun included	G	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23	, , ,
	Dawn of an Era: How Layer 2 Solutions Change the Workload on Ethereum Blockchains [confidential]	M	Lioba Heimbach, Quentin Kniep	HS 23
	Improving Non-Linear Redundancy Reduction in Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning [confidential]	G	Béni Egressy	HS 23
	Crawling the Bitcoin Client Ecosystem	S	Lucianna Kiffer, Lioba Heimbach	HS 23
	Cue and Mix-Point Estimation for Automated DJ Systems [confidential]	M	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	DataComp Challenge	G	Till Aczél, Benjamin Estermann	HS 23
	Personalized Federated Learning with Pre-Trained GNNs [confidential]	M	Béni Egressy	HS 23
	Pre-training a Deep Learning Model for Decoding Brain Activity [confidential]	B	Ard Kastrati	HS 23
	Diverse Datasets for BCI [confidential]	S	Ard Kastrati	HS 23
	Leveraging Dense Text Representations for Efficient Language Modeling	M	Peter Belcák	HS 23
	SUPClust: Active Learning at the Boundaries	S	Benjamin Estermann, Till Aczél	HS 23
	Exploring Activation Ensembles for Feed-Forward Neural Networks	B	Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys	HS 23
	Fair Transaction Ordering Website	B	Lioba Heimbach	HS 23
	Logarithmic Approximation for Road Pricing on Grids [confidential]	M	Andrei Constantinescu	HS 23
	GNN Pretraining	M	Béni Egressy	HS 23
	GNNs for TPU Graphs	S	Joël Mathys, Florian Grötschla	HS 23
	Bridging Image and Audio Compression: A Spectrogram-based Neural Approach	M	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	Machine Unlearning Challenge	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Benjamin Estermann	HS 23
	Evaluating Generative Models on Musical Mel Spectrogram Inversion [confidential]	G	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	Adding Music Modality to LLMs by Leveraging Contrastive Pretraining [confidential]	B	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	Network-level Attacks Against Ethereum PoS	B	Lioba Heimbach	HS 23
	In-Depth Analysis of Bidding Strategies in MEV Auctions [confidential]	G	Benjamin Estermann, Ye Wang	HS 23
	Train Small - Solve Big: Reinforcement Learning on Logic Puzzles using Graph Neural Networks [confidential]	M	Benjamin Estermann, Joël Mathys	HS 23
	Understanding the Effects of Improved Representations on Downstream Reinforcement Learning Tasks [confidential]	S	Benjamin Estermann	HS 23
	Automated Positioning for Smart Lighting [confidential]	M	Judith Beestermöller, Andreas Plesner	HS 23
	Peer-to-peer Networks under Churn	S	Lucianna Kiffer	HS 23
	Scaling MARL with Graph Neural Networks	M	Benjamin Estermann, Florian Grötschla	HS 23
	Text Compression for Efficient Language Generation	M	Peter Belcák	HS 23
	Coarse-to-Fine Unsupervised Text-to-Music Latent Diffusion [confidential]	M	Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	The Peer Discovery Layer of the Ethereum Network	S	Lucianna Kiffer	HS 23
	The Price of Weighted Majority Support [confidential]	G	Andrei Constantinescu	HS 23
	Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving in TrackMania [confidential]	G	Benjamin Estermann, Luca Lanzendörfer	HS 23
	Validity Properties of Byzantine Agreement [confidential]	G	Andrei Constantinescu, Diana Ghinea	HS 23
	Enhancing GNNs: An Exploration of Iterative Solving and Augmentation Techniques	B	Joël Mathys, Florian Grötschla	FS 23
	Enhancing the Building Blocks of Language-Based Visual Reasoning for ARC	M	Joël Mathys, Benjamin Estermann	FS 23
	Asynchronous GNNs [confidential]	G	Joël Mathys, Florian Grötschla	FS 23
	Audit for Digital Assets [confidential]	B	Jakub Sliwinski	FS 23
	DISCO-10M Creation and Data Exploration [confidential]	S	Luca Lanzendörfer, Florian Grötschla	FS 23
	Finite State Algorithm Learning on Graphs [confidential]	M	Joël Mathys, Florian Grötschla	FS 23
	Comparison of Electoral Systems and Optimization of Voting Advice Questionnaires	B	Andrei Constantinescu, Judith Beestermöller	FS 23
	Contrastive Pre-Training for Integer Sequence Understanding [confidential]	S	Peter Belcák	FS 23
	Post Merge Cryptocurrencies	B	Lucianna Kiffer, Yann Vonlanthen	FS 23
	Large Language Model Augmented Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning	B	Zhao Meng	FS 23
	Federated Reinforcement Learning with Heterogeneous Environments [confidential]	S	Xiaofeng Flint Fan, Luca Lanzendörfer	FS 23
	SUBER: An RL Environment with Simulated Human Behavior for Recommender Systems [confidential]	G	Xiaofeng Flint Fan, Luca Lanzendörfer	FS 23	,
	Enabling Interactions Between Encointer Local Communities	G	Yann Vonlanthen	FS 23
	Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models against Adversarial Attacks [confidential]	M	Zhao Meng	FS 23
	Expressions and Emotion Detection from HMD Sensors	M	Ard Kastrati	FS 23
	Generative Models for Financial Data: Applications to Initial Margin and its Backtesting [confidential]	M	Andreas Plesner	FS 23
	From Pixels to Nodes: A Segmentation-Driven Approach to Image Classification	G	Karolis Martinkus, Ard Kastrati	FS 23	, ,
	Adversarial Robustness of Expressive Graph Neural Networks	B	Karolis Martinkus	FS 23
	Abstract Approximate Agreement with Asynchronous Fallback [confidential]	S	Diana Ghinea, Andrei Constantinescu	FS 23
	Improving the Interface of the Jass AI	G	Benjamin Estermann	FS 23
	Efficient Neural Representation Learning for Star-Convex Boundaries [confidential]	S	Karolis Martinkus	FS 23
	Make Blockchain Public Again [confidential]	B	Benjamin Estermann, Ye Wang	FS 23
	From Searchers to Proposers: User Behaviour in Ethereum’s Proposer-Builder Separation	B	Ye Wang, Robin Fritsch	FS 23
	Mel Spectrogram Inversion [confidential]	B	Luca Lanzendörfer	FS 23
	Analyzing the Use and Potential of Transaction Access Lists in Ethereum [confidential]	S	Yann Vonlanthen, Quentin Kniep	FS 23
	Popularity for Approval Ballots [confidential]	B	Andrei Constantinescu	FS 23
	SALSA-CLRS: A Sparse and Scalable Benchmark for Algorithmic Reasoning [confidential]	S	Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys	FS 23
	Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Logic Puzzles [confidential]	M	Luca Lanzendörfer, Benjamin Estermann	FS 23
	Reinforcement Learning of TSP Heuristics with Message Passing Neural Networks	G	Xiaofeng Flint Fan, Joël Mathys	FS 23	,
	Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning [confidential]	B	Benjamin Estermann	FS 23
	A Generalisation Benchmark for Machine Learning Methods Predicting Fluid Flows [confidential]	B	Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys	FS 23
	Text-based Model on Voting Advice Application	S	Zhao Meng	FS 23
	Efficient and Scalable Graph Generation by Spectrum Preserving Local Expansion [confidential]	M	Karolis Martinkus	FS 23
	Swarm Intelligence Cup [confidential]	G	Benjamin Estermann, Florian Grötschla	FS 23
	Graph-based Metrics and Approaches for Sketch Generation [confidential]	M	Karolis Martinkus	FS 23
	Distributed Setup for Trackmania Reinforcement Learning	G	Luca Lanzendörfer, Benjamin Estermann	FS 23
	Exploring Community Influence on DAOs [confidential]	B	Robin Fritsch, Ye Wang	FS 23
	Wikipedia Walker	B	Luca Lanzendörfer, Judith Beestermöller	FS 23
	Bitcoin Lightning Network Statistics and On-Chain Analysis [confidential]	B	Florian Grötschla, Lioba Heimbach	HS 22
	Analyzing the Solana Blockchain [confidential]	B	Quentin Kniep, Jakub Sliwinski	HS 22
	A Neural-Guided Program Synthesis Approach to the Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge [confidential]	G	Joël Mathys, Benjamin Estermann	HS 22
	Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge - Reasoning with Language [confidential]	G	Joël Mathys, Benjamin Estermann	HS 22	,
	Challenging Code Search Models through Semantic Attacks [confidential]	S	Peter Belcák, Florian Grötschla	HS 22
	Challenging the Lexical Focus of Code Search	S	Peter Belcák, Florian Grötschla	HS 22