Aran Nayebi
Assistant Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Building a Natural Science of Intelligence 🧠🤖
Prev: ICoN Postdoctoral Fellow @MIT, PhD @Stanford NeuroAILab
Personal Website: cs.cmu.edu/~anayebi
- I'll be presenting my work *today* on the first formal guarantees addressing the decade-long open problem of Corrigibility (namely how we provably avoid loss of control with AI) in the AAAI Machine Ethics workshop (W37) at 15:15 pm ST in Tourmaline 207-209!
- If you're attending AAAI, I'll be presenting this work on alignment barriers *today* as an Oral presentation in the Special Track on AI Alignment at 11 am ST in conference room J!
- Reposted by Aran Nayebi[Not loaded yet]
- It was a pleasure speaking at the inaugural BAMΞ Mathematical Phenomenology Sprint, where I discussed reverse-engineering natural intelligence with embodied agents and how NeuroAI could inform a science of subjective experience and welfare.
- It was an absolute pleasure giving the University of Toronto Robotics Institute seminar on "Using Embodied Agents to Reverse-Engineer Natural Intelligence". Check out the recording here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Qm...
- Amazing talk last week by Dr. Aran Nayebi at #UofT on reverse-engineering the brain and building neuroscience-inspired AI. #neuroAI #compneuro @anayebi.bsky.social @utoronto.ca @uoftcompsci.bsky.social @vectorinstitute.ai
- Thank you to my wonderful & generous host @drlaschowski.bsky.social not only for showing me around the beautiful campus -- but also leading the faculty group chat to help me find the hallowed location of where AlexNet was originally developed (ultimately leading to Hinton being pinged to confirm)!
- Feel free to check out my new LessWrong post for a high-level summary of our two AAAI papers! "From Barriers to Alignment to the First Formal Corrigibility Guarantees" www.lesswrong.com/posts/M5owRc...
- We have 2 papers accepted to #AAAI2026 this year! The first paper 👇 on intrinsic barriers to alignment (establishing no free lunch theorems of encoding "all human values" & the inevitability of reward hacking) will appear as an *oral* presentation at the Special Track on AI Alignment.
- Feel free to check out my new LessWrong post for a high-level summary of this work! www.lesswrong.com/posts/dP8J6v...
- ...and that's a wrap for Fall 2025! In the final lecture of the semester, Matt Gormley & I covered bleeding-edge research topics in Generative AI, namely Interactive World Models + Science of AI Alignment. Next semester we plan to have our recordings publicly available on YouTube -- stay tuned!
- We have 2 papers accepted to #AAAI2026 this year! The first paper 👇 on intrinsic barriers to alignment (establishing no free lunch theorems of encoding "all human values" & the inevitability of reward hacking) will appear as an *oral* presentation at the Special Track on AI Alignment.
- In today's Generative AI lecture, we cover code generation & autonomous agents, discussing how Github Co-Pilot works, diving into multimodal agents (like Gemini 3 Pro!), and ending on AI scientists & AI for science. Lots more to explore in this rapidly growing space!
- Reposted by Aran Nayebi[Not loaded yet]
- In today's Generative AI lecture, we dive into reasoning models by dissecting how DeepSeek-R1 works (GRPO vs. PPO, which removes the need for a separate value network + training with a simpler rule-based reward), and end on mechanistic interpretability to better understand those reasoning traces.
- In today's Generative AI lecture, we primarily discuss scaling laws and the key factors that go into building large-scale foundation models. Slides: www.cs.cmu.edu/~mgormley/co... Full course info: bsky.app/profile/anay...
- Congratulations to my Ph.D. student Reece Keller for winning the best talk award at #CRSy25 on our project building the first task-optimized autonomous agent that predicts whole-brain data! Check out the post below for other cool talks!! Detailed summary: bsky.app/profile/reec...
- Full paper (to appear in NeurIPS 2025!) here: arxiv.org/abs/2506.00138
- Congrats to this year's Nobel Prize winners! Philippe's seminal work is in fact what our recent closed form UBI AI capability threshold builds on: bsky.app/profile/anay...
- My ILIAD ’25 talk, “Intrinsic Barriers & Pathways to Alignment”: why “aligning to all human values” provably can’t work, why reward hacking is inevitable in large state spaces, & how small value sets bypass “no free lunch” limits to yield formal corrigibility. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oajq...
- A nice application of our NeuroAI Turing Test! Check out @ithobani.bsky.social's thread for more details on comparing brains to machines!
- Honored to be quoted in this @newsweek.com article discussing how AI could accelerate the need for UBI. Read more here: www.newsweek.com/ai-taking-jo...
- In today's Generative AI lecture, we talk about all the different ways to take a giant auto-complete engine like an LLM and turn it into a useful chat assistant.
- In today's Generative AI lecture, we discuss the 4 primary approaches to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT): subset, adapters, Prefix/Prompt Tuning, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We show each of these amounts to finetuning a different aspect of the Transformer.
- 1/6 Recent discussions (e.g. Rich Sutton on @dwarkesh.bsky.social’s podcast) have highlighted why animals are a better target for intelligence — and why scaling alone isn’t enough. In my recent @cmurobotics.bsky.social seminar talk, “Using Embodied Agents to Reverse-Engineer Natural Intelligence”,
- Excited to have this work accepted as an *oral* to NeurIPS 2025!
- 1/ What if we make robots that process touch the way our brains do? We found that Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (ConvRNNs) pass the NeuroAI Turing Test in currently available mouse somatosensory cortex data. New paper by @Yuchen @Nathan @anayebi.bsky.social and me!
- Excited to have this work accepted to NeurIPS 2025! See you all in San Diego!
- 1/ I'm excited to share recent results from my first collaboration with the amazing @anayebi.bsky.social and @leokoz8.bsky.social ! We show how autonomous behavior and whole-brain dynamics emerge in embodied agents with intrinsic motivation driven by world models.
