Julian Skirzyński

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UCSD where I work with Berk Ustun. My research lies at the intersection of machine learning, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. I evaluate whether AI systems meet the expectations placed on them by users, developers, and regulators, identify where they fall short, and develop methods that make AI systems more reliable and useful in practice.

Previously, I was a research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute where I worked with Falk Lieder on interpretable reinforcement learning and on interventions to improve human planning. I also advised Educational Entertainment One – a Polish company that developed mobile games for English language learning. I obtained M.S. in Computer Science from McGill University, M.S. in Cognitive Science from University of Warsaw, and B.S. in Mathematics and Cognitive Science from University of Warsaw. You can access my full CV here and read my research statement here.

Selected Papers

• 
  Measuring What Matters: Synthetic Benchmarks for Concept Bottleneck Models
  Julian Skirzyński, Harry Cheon, Shreyas Kadekodi, Meredith Stewart, Berk Ustun
  In Submission, 2026
  [Paper] [Code]
• 
  On the Value of Interpretability in Human Decision-Making
  Julian Skirzyński, Elena Glassman, Berk Ustun
  In Submission, 2025
  [Paper] [Code]
• FAccT
  Discrimination Exposed? On the Reliability of Explanations for Discrimination Detection
  Julian Skirzyński, David Danks, Berk Ustun
  ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2025
  [Paper] [Code]
• Computational Behavior & Behavior

  
  Automatic discovery and description of human planning strategies
  Julian Skirzyński, Yash Raj Jain, Falk Lieder
  Computational Behavior & Behavior, 2023
  [Paper] [Code]
• Computational Behavior & Behavior

  
  Boosting Human Decision‑making with AI‑Generated Decision Aids
  Federic Becker, Julian Skirzyński, Falk Lieder
  Computational Behavior & Behavior, 2022
  [Paper] [Code]
• Machine Learning Journal

  
  Automatic discovery of interpretable planning strategies
  Julian Skirzyński, Federic Becker, Falk Lieder
  Machine Learning Journal, 2021
  [Paper] [Code]