Roman Belaire

Ph.D. fellow at Singapore Management University; I'm advised by Pradeep Varakantham, affiliated with the CARE.ai lab. My research concerns adversarial robustness in reinforcement learning, and I also have interests in RL fundamentals, generalization, and AI safety. Lately I've been working on formalizing LLM attacks (prompting LLMs to cause harm) as having specific hidden "intent", and creating robust defenses via application of my robust RL work. I enjoy exercising, playing games, eating, and being in the ocean.

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Research

  • Regret-Based Defense in Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (link to demo) AAMAS 2024 (Arxiv)

  • By optimizing a novel form of regret, we train RL agents that are more robust than previous robustly trained value-optimizing agents. Our regret notion, CCER, provides a scalable, transferrable way to compute adversarial cumulative regret for actions across time steps.
  • Probabilistic Perspectives on Error Minimization in Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (under review)Preprint

  • We progress the formulation of observation-adversarial RL by recognizing its true structure—a POMDP. Leveraging this fact, our proposed methods achieve SOTA performance across all adversarial RL benchmarks.
  • Automated Benchmarking to Red-Team Large Language Models Work in progress

  • In cooperation with Singapore's Infocomm and Media Development Authority (IMDA), we are developing novel ways to benchmark production LLMs in an automated fashion, using RL as a baseline framework to search the perturbation space.

Education

Singapore Management University Singapore

Ph.D. in Computer Science May 2025
Presidential Doctoral Fellowship recipient, 2024

California State University, Fullerton Fullerton, California

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science May 2020

Related Work Experience

  • Ph.D. Data Scientist Intern (Risk Research): American Express May 2024-August 2024
    Singapore

  • Associate Software Engineer: Toshiba America Business Solutions May 2021-August 2021
    Lake Forest, California

  • Machine Learning Engineer: California State University, Fullerton January 2019-September 2019
    Fullerton, California

Part-time Sea Creature

I love my work, but few are surprised to hear my true passion is the ocean. I try to schedule 1-2 dive trips per year, and I have aspirations to take and share some high-quality underwater photographs. Until then, here are a few favorites that I've taken:

A fuzzy Orangutan Crab tucked into a crop of Bubble Coral.
Mabul, Malaysia.
A Clownfish in its skylit anemone home. Interior of the Liberty Wreck,
Bali, Indonesia.
Coral close-up.
Tulamben, Bali, Indonesia.

Get in touch

If you want to collaborate, have a question, or just want to say hi, you can contact me through the links below.