About Me

I’m a final-year PhD student studying computer science at the UC Berkeley, advised by Stuart Russell and Sanjit Seshia. My PhD is currently funded by a National Science Foundation and a Cooperative AI Fellowship. I recently interned at Scale AI on the Reasoning and Agents team and the Safety, Evaluations, and Alignment Lab (SEAL). I received my BS in computer science and math from UT Austin in 2021, where I worked in the Autonomous Systems group with Ufuk Topcu. I also spent time at NASA Ames Research Center in the Planning and Scheduling Group with Jeremy Frank.

My current research is focused on AI safety and reinforcement learning, particularly in the area of multi-agent learning and LM agents. Recently, I’ve done work on enabling adversarial learning algorithms in cooperative settings, solving issues of covariate shift in training LM agents on long-horizon tasks, as well as evaluating safety risks posed by LM agents in multi-agent settings.

In my free time, I enjoy rock climbing, cycling, hiking, playing board games, and drinking specialty teas (I like ripe pu’ers, aged whites, and black teas).

Recent News

May 2026
I'm looking for full-time research scientist positions starting after I graduate.
Jan 2026
Our preprints on On-Policy Expert Corrections and SWE-Bench Pro are out.
Dec 2025
I presented Rational Policy Gradient at NeurIPS.
Sep 2025
I finished my internship at Scale AI.
Feb 2025

Publications

  1. SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks? teaser
    X. Deng, J. Da, E. Pan, Y. He, C. Ide, K. Garg, N. Lauffer, A. Park et. al.
    In submission at ICML 2026.
  2. Imitation Learning for Multi-Turn LM Agents via On-policy Expert Corrections teaser
    N. Lauffer, X. Deng, S. Kundurthy, B. Kenstler, J. Da.
    In submission at ICML 2026.
  3. Robust and Diverse Multi-Agent Learning via Rational Policy Gradient teaser
    N. Lauffer, A. Shah, M. Carroll, S. Seshia, S. Russell, and M. Dennis.
    NeurIPS 2025.
  4. Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI teaser
    Hammond et al.
    CAIF Technical Report 2025.
  5. Learning Symbolic Task Decompositions for Multi-Agent Teams teaser
    A. Shah*, N. Lauffer*, T. Chen*, N. Pitta*, S. Seshia.
    AAMAS 2025.
  6. Compositional Automata Embeddings for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning teaser
    B. Yalcinkaya*, N. Lauffer*, M. Vazquez-Chanlatte*, S. Seshia.
    NeurIPS 2024.
  7. Welfare Diplomacy: Benchmarking Language Model Cooperation teaser
    G. Mukobi, H. Erlebach, N. Lauffer, L. Hammond, A. Chan, J. Clifton.
    NeurIPS SOLAR 2023.
  8. Who Needs to Know? Minimal Knowledge for Optimal Coordination teaser
    N. Lauffer, A. Shah, M. Carroll, M. Dennis, and S. Russell.
    ICML 2023.
  9. On Expected Value Strong Controllability teaser
    N. Lauffer, W. Lassiter, J. Frank.
    JAIR 2023.
  10. Multiscale Heterogeneous Optimal Lockdown Control for COVID-19 Using Geographic Information teaser
    C. Neary, M. Cubuktepe, N. Lauffer, X. Jin, A. Phillips, Z. Xu, D. Tong, and U. Topcu.
    Scientific Reports 2022.
  11. No-regret Learning in Dynamic Stackelberg Games teaser
    N. Lauffer, M. Ghasemi, A. Hashemi, Y. Savas, and U. Topcu.
    arXiv preprint 2022.
  12. Learning Deterministic Finite Automata Decompositions from Examples and Demonstrations teaser
    N. Lauffer*, B. Yalcinkaya*, M. Vazquez-Chanlatte, A Shah, and S. Seshia.
    FMCAD 2022.
  13. Expedited Learning in MDPs with Side Information teaser
    M. Ornik, J. Fu, N. Lauffer, K. W. Perera, M. Alshiekh, M. Ono, and U. Topcu.
    CDC 2018.
  14. Affine Multiplexing Networks: System Analysis, Learning, and Computation teaser
    I. Papusha, U. Topcu, S. Car, N. Lauffer.
    arXiv preprint 2018.

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