Roman Belaire

Currently doing a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon with Prof. Ramayya Krishnan and the AIMSEC lab, where I am pursuing the intersection of explainabilty, robustness, and governance of agent behavior. Recently finished my PhD at Singapore Management University, under Pradeep Varakantham and 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 LLM attacks (prompting LLMs to cause harm) and defenses by characterizing them as hierarchical MDPs. I enjoy exercising, playing games, eating, and being in the ocean.

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Research

  • Regret-Based Defense in Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (project page) 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.
  • On Minimizing Adversarial Counterfactual Error in Robust Reinforcement Learning (project page)ICLR 2025 (Arxiv)

  • 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.
  • Hierarchical Red-Teaming for Large Language Models Preprint

  • We train LLMs to autonomously discover toxicity vulnerabilities in target LLMs through natural dialogue. We employ a hierarchical setup: one policy suggests a strategy and a second policy generates adversarial text according to the strategy. We achieve SOTA attacks on standard datasets, in addition to providing the first principled RL framework in this domain.

I am also proud to have participated as reviewer at the following venues: ICLR 2025, AAAI 2026, AAAI 2026: AI for Social Impact Track, ICLR 2026, ACL 2026, ICAPS 2026, Neurips 2026, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (Journal).

Academic

Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

PostdocJuly 2026 -

Singapore Management University Singapore

Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science May 2026
Presidential Doctoral Fellowship recipient, AY2024-25

California State University, Fullerton Fullerton, California

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science May 2020

Related Industry

  • 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:

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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.