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 long-term research goal is to create robust and aligned agents that can perform autonomous scientific research. I’m currently working on projects in RL for LLM capabilities, reward inference, adversarial robustness, robot predictability, and Seldonian LLM development. I’m generally very interested in multi-step reasoning problems for language model agents, particularly those that involve tool/computer use.

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 (tally so far: two in Beijing, one in Bangkok, one in Istanbul, one in Fort William, Scotland, one in London, and a few in Montreal).

Note to prospective undergraduate and master’s collaborators: please read this before reaching out.