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Researcher · Academic
Colin Raffel
University of TorontoAssociate Professor, Computer Science
Vector InstituteAssociate Research Director
Hugging FaceFaculty Researcher
Raffel co-created T5, which taught one model to translate, summarize and answer questions by treating every task as text in, text out. He also co-developed C4, a large web-text dataset for training language models.[1] His research now focuses on making large-scale AI more open, accessible and safer.
Career & education
Current rolesUniversity of Toronto2023-presentAssociate Professor, Computer ScienceVector Institute2023-presentAssociate Research DirectorHugging Face2021-presentFaculty Researcher
University of Toronto2023-presentVector Institute2023-presentHugging Face2021-presentPreviously
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Staff Research Scientist2020-2021
Senior Research Scientist2018-2020
Research Scientist2017-2018
Resident2016-2017
Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations80,219As of Aug 25, '25
Selected contributions
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
With Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li and others ·T5 treats language tasks as text input and text output within one framework.
Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
With Jason Wei, Yi Tay, Rishi Bommasani, Barret Zoph, Sebastian Borgeaud, Dani Yogatama, Maarten Bosma and others ·Examined abilities that appeared in larger language models but were absent in smaller ones.
References
- T5 — unified text-to-text learning and C4jmlr.org
Raffel co-created T5, which taught one model to translate, summarize and answer questions by treating every task as text in, text out. He also co-developed C4, a large web-text dataset for training language models.
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Reviewed August 8, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.