Mikayel Samvelyan
samvelyan.com
Mikayel Samvelyan
@samvelyan.com
Research Scientist @ Google DeepMind. Previously Meta (FAIR), Reddit, PhD UCL, MSc Oxford. samvelyan.com
I’m hiring a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind. This research role centers on topics of open-ended self-improvement and discovery with LLM agents.

📍 Location: London
🗓️ Duration: 6 months, 100%
🚀 Start date: June or July 2026

Apply now using the links below 👇
November 11, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Hello all! 👋 🚨 New Preprint Alert! 🚨

Code World Models for General Game-Playing. ♟️🎲 ♣️♥️♠️♦️

I am pleased to announce our new paper, which provides an extremely sample-efficient way to create an agent that can perform well in multi-agent, partially-observed, symbolic environments!

🧵 1/N
October 9, 2025 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Can AI agents adapt zero-shot, to complex multi-step language instructions in open-ended environments?

We present MaestroMotif, a method for skill design that produces highly capable and steerable hierarchical agents.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.08542
Code: github.com/mklissa/maestromotif
February 4, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Introducing 🧞Genie 2 🧞 - our most capable large-scale foundation world model, which can generate a diverse array of consistent worlds, playable for up to a minute. We believe Genie 2 could unlock the next wave of capabilities for embodied agents 🧠.
December 4, 2024 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Do you know what rating you’ll give after reading the intro? Are your confidence scores 4 or higher? Do you not respond in rebuttal phases? Are you worried how it will look if your rating is the only 8 among 3’s? This thread is for you.
November 27, 2024 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Just a heads up to everyone: @deep-mind.bsky.social is unfortunately a fake account and has been reported. Please do not follow it nor repost anything from it.
November 25, 2024 at 11:24 PM
Your LLM shall not pass! 🧙‍♂️

... unless it's really good in reasoning and games!

Check out this new amazing benchmark BALROG 👾 from @dpaglieri.bsky.social and team 👇
Tired of saturated benchmarks? Want scope for a significant leap in capabilities?

🔥 Introducing BALROG: a Benchmark for Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games!

BALROG is a challenging benchmark for LLM agentic capabilities, designed to stay relevant for years to come.

1/🧵
November 21, 2024 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
For no particular reason, I really like these starter packs:

Google DeepMind: go.bsky.app/GZ4hZzu
Theoretical CS: go.bsky.app/6A6GRSi
ML Theory: go.bsky.app/21nFz12
Differential Privacy: go.bsky.app/A7ABG83
Google DeepMind Starter Pack
Join the conversation
go.bsky.app
November 21, 2024 at 2:52 AM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this:

Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢

🧵⬇️
November 20, 2024 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Now that @jeffclune.bsky.social and @joelbot3000.bsky.social are here, time for an Open-Endedness starter pack.

go.bsky.app/MdVxrtD
November 20, 2024 at 7:08 AM
I am happy to share that I successfully defended my PhD thesis yesterday! 🎓

This journey has been nothing short of extraordinary, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has been a part of it. 🪇
Proud to announce that Dr @samvelyan.com defended his PhD thesis titled "Robust Agents in Open-Ended Worlds" yesterday 🥳. Massive thanks to @togelius.bsky.social and Ilija Bogunovic for examining! As is customary, Mikayel received a personal mortarboard from UCL DARK.
November 19, 2024 at 3:31 PM
Reposted by Mikayel Samvelyan
Lets get the multi-agent learning community started up here: go.bsky.app/9gsefkW
November 13, 2024 at 10:45 PM