About
I’m Mason Nakamura, a second-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. Broadly, I work on planning, reinforcement learning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). More specifically, I’m interested in improving sample-efficiency and performance of value alignment methods for diverse user preferences and enabling agents to continuously learn in non-stationary envrionments.
I’m currently seeking internships starting summer 2025!
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.
Fun Fact: My Erdös number is a 4 (view your Erdös number here)
Selected Papers
Mason Nakamura, Justin Svegliato, Samer Nashed, Shlomo Zilberstein, Stuart Russell
IROS 2023
Saaduddin Mahmud, Mason Nakamura, Shlomo Zilberstein
AAAI 2025
News
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 recently graduated summa cum laude from Marist College, majoring in applied mathematics and data science with a minor in computer science!
May
- I was awarded the Excellence in Mathematics Award for graduating as the top mathematics student at Marist College.
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.