Ali Shehper

I am an AI Researcher at Essential AI, working on the science of language model pre-training.

Previously, I was a Research Scientist (RL for Math) at Caltech, before which I was a Physicist, working on supersymmetric and topological quantum field theories.

Media

• How an Unsolved Math Problem Could Train AI to Predict Crises Years in Advance, Scientific American. August, 2025.
• AI Program Plays the Long Game to Solve Decades-Old Math Problems, Caltech Media. February, 2025.

Some News

• I will be presenting our work at NeurIPS 2025 on November 30th-December 5th in San Diego, CA.
• I will be giving an invited talk at the ML Tools for Mathematical Discovery workshop at 2026 Joint Mathematics Meetings.
• I gave an invited talk at ML4Jets2025 on August 23rd, 2025.
• I attended 2025 JAX & OpenXLA Summer DevLabs on June 23rd-24th in Sunnyvale, CA.

AI-For-Math Paper:

• What makes math problems hard for reinforcement learning: a case study, (Accepted at NeurIPS 2025)
  A. Shehper, A. M. Medina-Mardones, L. Fagan, B. Lewandowski, A. Gruen, Y. Qiu, P. Kucharski, Z. Wang, S. Gukov.
  Investigating reinforcement learning challenges in mathematical problem-solving.

Code:

• AC-Solver:
  A Python library for tackling long-horizon, ultra-sparse-reward RL environments, designed to accompany our case study.

• Sparse-Dictionary-Learning:
  An open-source implementation of Anthropic’s Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models with Dictionary Learning.

• Neural Scaling Laws:
  An implementation of Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models, along with results from An Empirical Model of Large-Batch Training.

• Language Model Feature Browser:
  A visualizer for features learned by a 1-layer Language Model, with the GitHub Repository.

Physics / Math Papers:

• PhD Thesis: Aspects of Supersymmetric and Topological Quantum Field Theories.

• Nonabelian Twists of the D4 Theory:
  J. Distler, B. Ergun, A. Shehper (co-primary contributor, names in alphabetical order).

• Symmetries of 2d TQFTs and Equivariant Verlinde Formulae for General Groups:
  S. Gukov, D. Pei, C. Reid, A. Shehper (primary contributor, names in alphabetical order).

• Distinguishing 4d N=2 SCFTs:
  J. Distler, B. Ergun, A. Shehper (co-primary contributor, names in alphabetical order).

• Deformations of surface defect moduli spaces:
  A. Neitzke, A. Shehper (primary contributor, names in alphabetical order).

Contact and Collaboration

I am always open to discussions on reinforcement learning, AI interpretability, and related areas of physics and mathematics. Feel free to reach out for potential collaborations, research opportunities, or simply to connect.

Google Scholar / GitHub / Twitter / LinkedIn