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Automated AI research holds great potential to accelerate scientific discovery. However, current LLMs often generate plausible-looking but ineffective ideas. Execution grounding may help, but it is unclear whether automated execution is…

Self-modification of agents embedded in complex environments is hard to avoid, whether it happens via direct means (e.g. own code modification) or indirectly (e.g. influencing the operator, exploiting bugs or the environment). It has been…

AI agents are increasingly used to solve complex, multi-step tasks, but existing multi-agent frameworks remain brittle as workflows grow in scale and depth. Small errors at intermediate stages can propagate through agent interactions, while…

In many real-world continuous action domains, human agents must decide which actions to attempt and then execute those actions to the best of their ability. However, humans cannot execute actions without error. Human performance in these…

Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or under-specified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios…

Tool-calling agents are evaluated on tool selection, parameter accuracy, and scope recognition, yet LLM trajectory assessments remain inherently post-hoc. Disconnected from the active execution loop, such assessments identify errors that…

Can AI agents predict whether they will succeed at a task? We study agentic uncertainty by eliciting success probability estimates before, during, and after task execution. All results exhibit agentic overconfidence: some agents that…

LLM agents are deployed in environments where they must interact to acquire information. In these scenarios, the agent must reason about inherent cost-uncertainty tradeoffs in how to act, such as when to stop exploring and commit to an…

AI research agents accelerate ML research by automating hypothesis generation, experimentation, and empirical refinement. Existing agent strategies range from greedy hill-climbing to tree search and evolutionary optimization, yet which…

If AI models can detect when they are being evaluated, the effectiveness of evaluations might be compromised. For example, models could have systematically different behavior during evaluations, leading to less reliable benchmarks for…

In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the…

Explainable AI (XAI) holds significant promise for enhancing the transparency and trustworthiness of AI-driven threat detection in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). However, identifying the appropriate level and format of explanation,…

System prompts for AI coding agents increasingly employ motivational framing -- from neutral task descriptions to fear-driven threats -- yet no controlled study has examined whether such framing affects agent behavior. We present two…

Unlike autoregressive models, which generate tokens sequentially and benefit from reasoning-before-answering strategies such as Chain-of-Thought, Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) refine all sequence positions simultaneously, raising…

Autonomous machine learning agents have revolutionized scientific discovery, yet they remain constrained by a Generate-Execute-Feedback paradigm. Previous approaches suffer from a severe Execution Bottleneck, as hypothesis evaluation relies…

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into decision-making processes, the ability to trust their outputs is crucial. To earn human trust, LLMs must be well…

Large language models now write software, draft legal documents, and produce clinical notes, yet fundamental limits, from Turing and Arrow to the No Free Lunch theorems, shape what computation can do. This thesis turns such impossibility…

As AI systems advance in capabilities, measuring their safety and alignment to human values is becoming paramount. A fast-growing field of AI research is devoted to developing such assessments. However, most current advances therein may be…

For AI systems to garner widespread public acceptance, we must develop methods capable of explaining the decisions of black-box models such as neural networks. In this work, we identify two issues of current explanatory methods. First, we…

For machine agents to successfully interact with humans in real-world settings, they will need to develop an understanding of human mental life. Intuitive psychology, the ability to reason about hidden mental variables that drive observable…