About
I’m Mason Nakamura, a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UMass Amherst, working in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) as a member of the Resource-Bounded Reasoning Lab, under the guidance of Professor Shlomo Zilberstein. My research is funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship where I broadly work on safety and alignment of AI systems, using methodologies from reinforcment learning and sequential decision-making.
My research interests lie in the intersections of:
- Value Alignment & AI Safety: Multi-Objective Alignment, Inference-Time Alignment, Preference Learning, Post-Training
- Multi-Agent Systems: LLM-based Coordination, Multi-Agent VLAs
- Embodied Agents: Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs)
Previously, I had internships at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) / Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) (Summer 2023) on building ethically-compliant autonomous systems using constrained deep reinforcement learning, CHAI/BAIR (Summer-Fall 2022) building a formal framework for computationally bounded agents, Moravian University (Summer 2021 NSF REU) working on extremal and spectral graph theory, and Michigan State University (Summer 2020 NSF REU) working on geometric deep learning.
I’m currently seeking internship opportunities for Summer 2026
Selected Papers
* indicates equal contribution
arXiv 2025 (Under Review)
arXiv 2025 (Under Review)
AAAI 2025 GenPlan Workshop
News
2025
June
- I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
2024
December
- Our paper on accelerating reward modeling using LLM guidance and abstract concepts has been accepted to AAAI-2025!
- Our paper on employing critical states in experience selection strategies for continual reinforcemnt learning has been accepted to AAAI-2025 Workshop on generalization in planning (GenPlan)!
2023
June
- Our paper on formalizing an intelligent system as a composition of contract algorithms has been accepted to IROS-2023!
May
- I graduated summa cum laude from Marist College, majoring in applied mathematics and data science with a minor in computer science.
March
- I accepted a computer science MS/PhD offer at UMass Amherst in the Resource-Bounded Reasoning Lab directed by Shlomo Zilberstein.
2022
May-November
- Visiting scholar at the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at UC Berkeley on building well-founded AI using metareasoning.
March
- Our paper on using combinatorics to solve a combinatorial geometry problem has been accepted to MAA Mathematics Magazine!
2021
May-August
- Visiting scholar at Moravian University as part of an NSF REU on computational methods in discrete mathematics working on spectral and extremal graph theory.
2020
May-August
- Visiting scholar at Michigan State University as part of an NSF REU on experimental mathematics working on geometric deep learning.