Hélain Zimmermann
Hélain Zimmermann

Hélain Zimmermann

Co-Founder & CTO @ Ailog

Stockholm, Sweden

I ship AI systems: RAG, agents, fine-tuning. Most of what I write here comes from code that actually runs in production.

Right now I am finishing an MSc in Machine Learning at KTH Stockholm, alongside an engineering degree at ENSIMAG Grenoble. Before Sweden I spent a summer at INRIA Grenoble working on how language models memorize personal data when fine-tuned on sensitive corpora. That work became arXiv:2501.02407, which I co-authored.

In March 2025 I left the Nsigma Junior-Enterprise and co-founded Ailog. We build AI features for small and mid-sized teams: retrieval over whatever internal docs they already have, agent workflows that replace brittle scripts, automation glue between tools they already pay for. Constraints: GDPR when it applies, teams of 3 to 20, tight budgets, and a demo that cannot survive a Monday morning is useless.

What I work on

Ailog: consulting and SaaS

RAG over whatever docs clients already have (PDFs, Notion dumps, ticket history). Agent orchestration for internal workflows. Glue between tools they already pay for. My job is to scope the problem, pick boring infrastructure when it fits, and ship something ops can actually run.

Research: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Multi-expert LoRA with a learned router, in the spirit of Mixture-of-Experts but at the adapter level. The question: given 8 tasks (SQuAD, IMDB, CoNLL-2003, WikiText-2, GSM8K, XSum, CommonsenseQA, MNLI), does a gating network learn to send each task to the right expert without manual partitioning? Phi-2 (2.7B) is done across 7 configurations. Top-K sparse routing with k=2 shows the strongest specialization so far (task specialization score 0.0657, versus 0.0065 for a load-balanced baseline). Qwen2.5-0.5B is currently training. Llama-3.2-3B and Gemma-2-2B are queued for the same 7-config sweep.

Research: validation of LLM-based social simulations

SimValid is a multi-scale validation framework (micro, meso, macro) for social simulations driven by LLM agents. It is built on an open-source rewrite of MiroFish where Zep Cloud is replaced by a local NetworkX memory graph. 15 quantitative metrics, 5 per scale. Methodological goal: most published LLM simulations claim emergent behavior with no benchmarks. I want to show you can actually test those claims. Target venue: AAMAS 2027.

A broader list of projects (open-source, academic, personal) lives on the homepage.

Research

Towards the Anonymization of the Language Modeling

arXiv:2501.02407 · 2025 · INRIA Grenoble

With Antoine Boutet, Lucas Magnana, Juliette Sénéchal

Language models fine-tuned on sensitive corpora memorize personal data and leak it under targeted prompts. We tested two training schemes against this: a masked objective for BERT-style models, a causal objective for GPT-style ones. Both target direct identifiers (names, numbers) and indirect ones (contextual hints that re-identify a person). We evaluated on a medical dataset against several baselines. Privacy is preserved; utility drops less than I expected. Numbers and code are on the arXiv page.

Experience

Mar 2025 – Present

Co-Founder & CTO

Ailog

Consulting and SaaS in AI, automation, and applied mathematics for European companies. I lead engineering: RAG systems, LLM agents, privacy-aware pipelines.

Mar 2025 – Present

Technical Consultant — RAG

Nsigma Junior-Enterprise • Grenoble

RAG systems for student-run consulting projects. Previously Technical Director (Nov 2023 – Mar 2025).

Jun – Sep 2024

Research Intern

INRIA Grenoble

Privacy-preserving NLP. Co-authored arXiv:2501.02407 on text anonymization and memorization risks in language models across French and English.

May – Jun 2023

IT Technician Intern

IE-Concept

IoT and embedded systems.

Education

2025 – 2026

MSc Machine Learning

KTH Royal Institute of Technology • Stockholm

Joint cursus with ENSIMAG

2023 – 2026

Engineering Degree

ENSIMAG - Grenoble INP • Grenoble

Applied Mathematics & Computer Science

2021 – 2023

Cycle Préparatoire Polytechnique (CPP)

Grenoble INP • Valence

Integrated engineering preparatory cycle

Get in touch

Consulting work (RAG, agents, AI engineering) goes through Ailog, or email me directly if you prefer. For editorial feedback on an article, same email, just mention which one.

Editorial policy and corrections → /editorial-policy