Viktor Moskvoretskii

I am a Fellowship PhD Student in Computer Science at EPFL DLab. I am now working on LLM safety under the supervision of Prof. Robert West. We are largely targeting the pre-training phase for safety, reflected in the Model Raising paradigm.

My research interests are Personas inside of the LLM and their connections to safety and general LLM behavior.

I have previously worked as a Research Lead at Skoltech NLP Lab focusing on QA and uncertainty estimation.

I have pursued my M.S. in Machine Learning at HSE University under the supervision of Prof. Chris Biemann and Irina Nikishina.

I am open to collaborations and to supervising student projects; see the collaboration page.

Google Scholar

selected publications

Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

Julian Minder^*, Viktor Moskvoretskii^*, Raghav Singhal^*, 12 more authors
* Equal contribution

arXiv preprint, 2026

arXiv Website Blog Bib

@misc{minder2026spp,
  title        = {Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero},
  author       = {Minder, Julian and Moskvoretskii, Viktor and Singhal, Raghav and Jiao, Difan and Arditi, Andy and Cui, Shaobo and Borjigin, Yiderigun and Bali, Kartik and Krsteski, Stefan and Raj, Harsh and Nguyen, Huu and Brinkmann, Jannik and Anderson, Ashton and Aydin, Roland and West, Robert},
  year         = {2026},
  eprint       = {2608.13482},
  archivePrefix= {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {cs.LG},
  url          = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13482}
}

Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining

Viktor Moskvoretskii^*, Dominik Glandorf^*, 3 more authors
* Equal contribution

arXiv preprint, 2026

arXiv Bib

@misc{moskvoretskii2026persona,
  title        = {Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining},
  author       = {Moskvoretskii, Viktor and Glandorf, Dominik and Medina Moreira, Jorge and Käser, Tanja and West, Robert},
  year         = {2026},
  eprint       = {2605.13329},
  archivePrefix= {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {cs.CL},
  url          = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13329}
}

Adaptive Retrieval Without Self-Knowledge? Bringing Uncertainty Back Home

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Maria Marina, Mikhail Salnikov, 6 more authors

In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2025

ACL Anthology Bib

@inproceedings{moskvoretskii-etal-2025-adaptive,
  title     = {Adaptive Retrieval Without Self-Knowledge? Bringing Uncertainty Back Home},
  author    = {Moskvoretskii, Viktor and Marina, Maria and Salnikov, Mikhail and Ivanov, Nikolay and Pletenev, Sergey and Galimzianova, Daria and Krayko, Nikita and Konovalov, Vasily and Nikishina, Irina and Panchenko, Alexander},
  editor    = {Che, Wanxiang and Nabende, Joyce and Shutova, Ekaterina and Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month     = jul,
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Vienna, Austria},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.319/},
  doi       = {10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.319},
  pages     = {6355--6384},
  ISBN      = {979-8-89176-251-0}
}