ICML 2026
PostTrainBench: Can LLM Agents Automate LLM Post-Training?
Can AI agents post-train AI models entirely on their own?
The Bethge Lab is an academic, non-profit research group at the Tübingen AI Center, led by Matthias Bethge.
We work in the open, closely with Open Athena, the non-profit bringing frontier AI capabilities to academia.
We study continual self-improvement — agents that get better with use.
The Bethge Lab is an academic, non-profit research group at the Tübingen AI Center, led by Matthias Bethge.
We work in the open, closely with Open Athena, the non-profit bringing frontier AI capabilities to academia.
The Bethge Lab is an academic, non-profit research group at the Tübingen AI Center, led by Matthias Bethge.
We work in the open, closely with Open Athena, the non-profit bringing frontier AI capabilities to academia.

The Bethge Lab is an academic, non-profit research group at the Tübingen AI Center, led by Matthias Bethge.
We work in the open, closely with Open Athena, the non-profit bringing frontier AI capabilities to academia.
The Bethge Lab is an academic, non-profit research group at the Tübingen AI Center, led by Matthias Bethge.
We work in the open, closely with Open Athena, the non-profit bringing frontier AI capabilities to academia.

The Bethge Lab is an academic, non-profit research group at the Tübingen AI Center, led by Matthias Bethge.
We work in the open, closely with Open Athena, the non-profit bringing frontier AI capabilities to academia.
ICML 2026
Can AI agents post-train AI models entirely on their own?
NeurIPS 2025
Can AI agents invent genuinely faster algorithms?
ACL 2025
Evaluation that keeps growing with the models it measures.
NeurIPS 2026
Teaching agents which steps actually helped, so they can learn from long, real-world tasks.
ECCV 2026
Predicting where people look with today's foundation models.
eLife 2025
Building an open, shared model of the retina together, across labs and species.

We collaborate closely with Open Athena. PhD students join us through IMPRS-IS and ELLIS. We publish our benchmarks, code and data openly.
People
Current members and alumni →We are recruiting PhD students, postdocs and research engineers, and are happy to hear from you.