Aran Nayebi

For those who can't make it:

Slides: anayebi.github.io/files/slides...

Blogpost summary: www.lesswrong.com/posts/M5owRc...

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!

From Barriers to Alignment to the First Formal Corrigibility Guarantees — LessWrong This post summarizes my two related papers that will appear at AAAI 2026 in January: …

Blogpost summary: www.lesswrong.com/posts/M5owRc...

Slides: anayebi.github.io/files/slides...

YouTube video by Aran Nayebi Intrinsic Barriers & Practical Pathways for AI Alignment: An Agreement-Based Complexity Analysis

For those who can't make it, here's a pre-recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAoP...

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!

What Virtual Zebrafish Can Teach Us About Autonomous AI Inspired by the natural curiosity he saw in animals, MLD Assistant Professor Aran Nayebi and his CMU colleagues created a virtual zebrafish that acted like a real zebrafish without any prior training.

Inspired by the natural curiosity he saw in animals, MLD Assistant Professor @anayebi.bsky.social and his CMU colleagues created a virtual zebrafish that acted like a real zebrafish without any prior training.

And our NeurIPS '25 Oral on tactile processing: bsky.app/profile/trin...

As well as our recent NeurIPS '25 work on embodied agents & intrinsic motivation: bsky.app/profile/reec...

This talk also discusses our NeuroAI Turing Test: bsky.app/profile/anay...

YouTube video by Mathematical Consciousness Science Aran Nayebi: Reverse-Engineering Natural Intelligence with Embodied Agents

Full recording here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVOu...

Discussion starts at 48:00! Thank you to @johanneskleiner.bsky.social & @lenoreblum.bsky.social for inviting me, and Lenore for graciously introducing me 🙂

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.

YouTube video by Aran Nayebi Intrinsic Barriers & Practical Pathways for AI Alignment: An Agreement-Based Complexity Analysis

10 min video summary here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAoP...

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)!

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...

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...

🙏

Feel free to check out my new LessWrong post for a high-level summary of this work! www.lesswrong.com/posts/dP8J6v...

Matt's slides on Interactive World Models: www.cs.cmu.edu/~mgormley/co...

My slides on the Science of AI Alignment: www.cs.cmu.edu/~mgormley/co...

...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!

The 2nd paper circumvents the first paper's main "no free lunch" barrier of encoding "all human values", by identifying small value sets that yield the *first* formal guarantees on corrigibility.

In the AAAI Machine Ethics Workshop (W37) Proceedings 👇:
bsky.app/profile/anay...

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.

Slides: www.cs.cmu.edu/~mgormley/co...
Full course info: bsky.app/profile/anay...

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!

Join us December 5th at University of Toronto (in-person and online) for a special seminar by Dr. Aran Nayebi on reverse-engineering the brain and building neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence.

#neuroAI #compneuro @anayebi.bsky.social @utoronto.ca @uoftcompsci.bsky.social

Slides: www.cs.cmu.edu/~mgormley/co...
Full course info: bsky.app/profile/anay...

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.

Finally, we briefly discuss Querying Transformers for text-image alignment, as a hold-over from last lecture on multimodal foundation models!

We also discuss data quality & amount (where you get great performance with a smaller model trained on lots of tokens), how to get good data depending on your application, and Moravec's paradox for robotics foundation models.

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...