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 at Caltech where I worked on Reinforcement Learning for Math. Before that, I was a Physicist, working on supersymmetric and topological quantum field theories.

Blog

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.

RL-For-Math:

• 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).

Google Scholar / GitHub / Twitter / LinkedIn