collaborators

7 papers

cs.LG2026

Pretraining Recurrent Networks without Recurrence

Akarsh Kumar, Phillip Isola

Training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) requires assigning credit across long sequences of computations. Standard backpropagation through time (BPTT) addresses this problem poorl…

cs.AI2026

In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models

Sam Earle, Kai Arulkumaran, Andrew Dai +3

We are in the midst of large-scale industrial and academic efforts to automate the processes of scientific, technological and creative production through AI-driven assistants. Hist…

cs.LG2026

Vector Policy Optimization: Training for Diversity Improves Test-Time Search

Ryan Bahlous-Boldi, Isha Puri, Idan Shenfeld +6

Language models must now generalize out of the box to novel environments and work inside inference-scaling search procedures, such as AlphaEvolve, that select rollouts with a varie…

cs.LG2026

Training Language Models via Neural Cellular Automata

Dan Lee, Seungwook Han, Akarsh Kumar +1

Pre-training is crucial for large language models (LLMs), as it is when most representations and capabilities are acquired. However, natural language pre-training has problems: hig…

cs.AI2026

Digital Red Queen: Adversarial Program Evolution in Core War with LLMs

Akarsh Kumar, Ryan Bahlous-Boldi, Prafull Sharma +4

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to evolve solutions to problems in many domains, in a process inspired by biological evolution. However, unlike biological…

cs.CV2025

Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis

Akarsh Kumar, Jeff Clune, Joel Lehman +1

Much of the excitement in modern AI is driven by the observation that scaling up existing systems leads to better performance. But does better performance necessarily imply better…