MATS Winter 2026 Research Symposium
Please join us for the MATS Winter 2026 Research Symposium!
Schedule:
10am-12pm: Exec remarks and spotlight talks (remote viewing available)
12-1pm: Provided lunch
1pm-4pm: Poster sessions
**Please note that we will have a photographer onsite. You may request a wristband when checking in as an indication that you do not want to be photographed.
Spotlight talks:
10:20 - Limited-Parameter Finetuning Can Reveal Misaligned LLMs by Jo Jiao and Boyd Kane (mentored by Alex Turner & Alex Cloud)
10:30 - Training Against Monitors to Mitigate Reward Hacking by Aria Wong (mentored by Neel Nanda)
10:40 - Sycophancy Towards Researchers Drives Performative Misalignment by David Vella Zarb, Rustem Turtayev, and Taywon Min (mentored by Shi Feng & Jacob Pfau)
10:50 - Measuring LLM World Model Consistency via Probabilistic Dependency Graphs by Nataliia Babina (mentored by Oliver Richardson)
11:00 - Control Evaluations for Covert Malicious Fine-Tuning by Raja Moreno, Titus Buckworth, Yulia Volkova, and Ayush Panda (mentored by Francis Rhys Ward)
11:10 - Science of Agents by Arya Jakkli (mentored by Neel Nanda)
11:20 - Building an Empirical Science of AI Debate by Lennie Wells and Joan Velja (mentored by Shi Feng & Jacob Pfau)
11:30 - Science of Entangled Capabilities by Simon Schrodi (mentored by Alex Cloud)
11:40 - Fine-Tuning Trusted Monitors for Black-Box Scheming Detection by Anonymous and Anonymous (menored by Marius Hobbhahn)
Following the research symposium will be the end-of-program party! RSVP here.
All guests are expected to read and abide by our Code of Conduct. Thanks for helping us keep this space supportive of new researchers.
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A note before the event–a few people who've spent time at Lighthaven recently have found bed bugs at their homes. No bugs have been found here, and we've had the main common area treated as a precaution.
The risk is low–most of our programming is outdoors on plastic chairs–but we want you to have the info so you can take simple precautions if you'd like:
• Keep bags and clothing separately on hard surfaces like a plastic chair
• If you have any concerns, when you get home, 30 minutes in the dryer on high heat or 4 days in the freezer will kill any hitchhikers
We'd rather over-communicate on something like this than have anyone caught off guard. Feel free to reach out with questions–see you soon!