The Chair for Machine Learning, led by Prof. Dr. Asja Fischer, has been established since 2019 and is part of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Ruhr University Bochum. It is associated with the Institut für Neuroinformatik (INI), the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security (HGI), the Cluster of Excellence for Cyber Security (CASA), the Lamarr Institute and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
Our research is primarily focused on deep learning, with a core objective being the advancement of the foundations of deep learning. Despite the groundbreaking capabilities of modern deep neural networks, our theoretical understanding is still limited. However, we are convinced that a thorough theoretical understanding is needed for the trustworthy application of existing learning algorithms and the development of novel robust and efficient learning approaches.
Another core area of our research is the intersection of machine learning and security. Here, we are interested in topics like uncertainty quantification, robustness against adversarial attacks, and defense strategies against the threats induced by artificial media generated by machine learning systems.
Latest News
Paper presented at CVPR Findings 2026!
Our paper „PRADA: Probability-Ratio-Based Attribution and Detection of Autoregressive-Generated Images“ got accepted at the Findings of the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026!
Paper presented at CVPR 2026!
Our Post-doc Dr. Denis Lukovnikov and our PhD student Andreas Müller presented the work “ClusterMark: Towards Robust Watermarking for Autoregressive Image Generators with Visual Token Clustering” at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) in Denver, CO, USA (June 3 – June 7) 2026.
Test of Time Award ECML PKDD 2025
At this year’s European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, the Test of Time Award went to a paper on „Difference Target Propagation“ by Dong-Hyun Lee, Saizheng Zhang, Asja Fischer, and Yoshua Bengio from 2015.
Welcome Henning! New PostDoc
We are very happy to announce, that as of this September 2025, Henning Petzka joins our chair as new PostDoc!
Henning holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Toronto and has since transitioned into machine learning and data science.
Contact
Postal Address
Ruhr University Bochum
Faculty of Computer Science
Chair for Machine Learning
Universitätsstraße 150
44801 Bochum
Directions
The Chair for Machine Learning is located in building MC, starting with room 5.123. Directions can be found here.