Thomas Jiralerspong

I am a Master’s student in computer science co-supervised by Yoshua Bengio and Doina Precup at Mila and Université de Montréal. I previously completed my Bachelor’s in honours computer science at McGill University working with Blake Richards and Doina Precup.

I am broadly interested in building AI systems that have more human-like capabilities such as system 2 thinking, out-of-distribution generalization, compositional reasoning, long-term planning, and efficient learning, as well as applying AI to projects that have a concrete positive impact on society.

To this end, my current research directions include:

• Incorporating ideas from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and causality into our AI models (example)

• Exploiting the common-sense/world-knowledge capabilities of LLMs and VLMs to train/improve our AI models (example)

• Applying AI to projects related to healthcare, drug discovery, climate change, and autonomous driving (example)

I am currently:

• Lab representative at Mila
• Teaching assistant for Representation Learning (IFT6135) at Université de Montréal
• Senior advisor for the McGill A.I. Society

I have previously been:

• Research intern at Waabi working with Kelvin Wong and Chris Zhang and at the Vector Institute working with John Willes and Marshall Wang
• Software development intern at Amazon, Square Enix, and Expedia
• Undergraduate researcher with Blake Richards and Doina Precup working with Khimya Khetarpal and Chen Sun
• Selected to attend the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum
• Co-leader of McGill’s team for Project X, where we received the highest score out of 25 submitted papers
• Co-organizer and teaching assistant for the McGill A.I. Society’s Accelerated Introduction to ML Bootcamp
• Teaching assistant for Software Systems (COMP206) at McGill

In my free time, I enjoy traveling, watching/analyzing good movies, and writing sad songs (check out my (very) amateur music here)!

Reach out at thomas.jiralerspong@mila.quebec if there is anything you want to discuss, I’m always happy to talk!