Will Schwarzer

Hey there, I’m Will. I’m a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I work with Philip Thomas, as well as Bruno Castro da Silva and Scott Niekum. My research goal is to ensure that the enormous promise of increasingly autonomous systems is realized both safely and efficiently. I’m currently working on projects in reward inference, adversarial robustness, robot predictability, Seldonian LLM development, Seldonian RL, LLM red-teaming, and LLM fine-tuning from language feedback. At some point, I would also like to evaluate whether multimodal foundation models learn better emergent reward inference abilities than LLMs.

Fun fact: this headshot was taken at an excellent studio in Beijing while I was studying Mandarin there. I’m always happy to chat in Chinese. Aside from languages, I also enjoy playing the piano and rock climbing. I particularly love exploring climbing gyms in new countries (two in Beijing, one in Bangkok, and one in Istanbul so far).