Martin Klissarov

I am a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, working with a team of brilliant creative minds under Prof. Ed Grefenstette. I am also wrapping up my PhD student supervised by Prof. Doina Precup and Prof. Marlos C. Machado at McGill University and Mila. I am particularly interested in scalable human-inspired approaches to intelligence.

Humans are able to continually adapt in diverse and creative ways, can AI agents do the same?

To answer this question, my research is currently centered on discovering and exploiting temporal structure existing within streams of data.

Twitter  |  GitHub  |  Google Scholar

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News

  • 10/02/2025 MaestroMotif has been given an oral presentation at ICLR 2025! Take a look at our vision for the future of human-AI collaboration.

  • 25/01/2025 Two papers accepted at ICLR 2025! (1) MaestroMotif: a scalable algorithm for building hierarchical agents. (2) We study the capabilities of LLMs to model policies, rewards and transition functions.

  • 19/08/2024 Motif was featured in a recent article about AI agents and open-endedness by Air Street Press.

  • 04/03/2023 Co-organizing a workshop on "Training Agents with Foundation Models" at RLC in August. We have some exciting things coming, stay tuned!

  • 25/10/2023 The work resulting from my Meta internship, Motif, has been accepted at ICLR 2024! 🎶

  • 25/10/2023 We have released the code for Motif, a general method to distill prior knowledge from LLMs into actionable RL agents. We have also published a short blogpost that describes Motif.

  • 05/06/2023 Started a research intern at Meta Montreal with Shagun Sodhani, Mikael Henaff and Amy Zhang!

  • 25/04/2023 Our work with Marlos, Deep Laplacian-based Options, has been accepted to ICML 2023! 🏝

  • 31/01/2023 The project we worked on with Marlos C. Machado during my DeepMind intern has been released on arXiv! We scale up a promising approach for option discovery that yields strong exploration performance.

  • 08/10/2022 Selected as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2022! We all have a part to play in making our research community better, as much as time allows us.

  • 14/09/2022 Our work on leveraging meta learning for emphatic algorithms was accepted at NeurIPS 2022!

  • 11/07/2022 Started a research internship at DeepMind Alberta with Marlos C. Machado!

  • 16/04/2022 Selected as a Highlighted Reviewer for ICLR 2022! Hopefully those reviews helped the authors.

  • 15/10/2021 Selected as an Outstanding Reviewer (top 8%) for NeurIPS 2021! Amazing to be recognized for the time and thought put into the reviewing service.

  • 28/09/2021 "Flexible Option Learning" has been accepted as a Spotlight to NeurIPS 2021! The paper and code will be out soon.

  • 23/09/2021 Started a research internship at Amazon Web Services under the supervision of Alex Smola and Rasool Fakoor.

  • 01/04/2021 Started a research internship at Microsoft Research Montreal under the supervision of Mehdi Fatemi and Romain Laroche.

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    Highlighted Research
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    MaestroMotif: Skill Design from Artificial Intelligence Feedback
    Martin Klissarov, Mikael Henaff, Roberta Raileanu, Shagun Sodhani, Pascal Vincent, Amy Zhang, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Doina Precup, Marlos C. Machado*, Pierluca D'Oro*
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025, Oral

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    On the Modeling Capabilities of Large Language Models in Sequential Decision Making
    Martin Klissarov, Devon R. Hjelm, Alex Toshev, Bogdan Mazoure
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025

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    Motif: Intrinsic Motivation from Artificial Intelligence Feedback
    Martin Klissarov*, Pierluca D'Oro*, Shagun Sodhani, Roberta Raileanu, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Pascal Vincent, Amy Zhang and Mikael Henaff
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
    FMDM Workshop at NeurIPS 2023, Spotlight
    ALOE Workshop at NeurIPS 2023, Spotlight

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    Deep Laplacian-Based Options for Temporally-Extended Exploration
    Martin Klissarov and Marlos C. Machado
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023

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    Flexible Option Learning
    Martin Klissarov and Doina Precup
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021, Spotlight

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    When Waiting is not an Option: Learning Options using the Deliberation Cost

    Jean Harb, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Martin Klissarov, Doina Precup
    Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2018

    Education
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    McGill University2020 - 2025
    PhD in Computer Science
    Supervisor: Prof. Doina Precup and Prof. Marlos C. Machado

    mcgill

    McGill University2018 - 2020
    MSc in Computer Science
    Supervisor: Prof. Doina Precup

    Reviewing
    • TMLR: 2022 / 2023
    • NeurIPS: 2020 / 2021 (Outstanding reviewer) / 2022 (Top reviewer) / 2023 / 2024
    • ICML: 2021 / 2022 / 2023
    • AAAI: 2021 / 2022
    • ICLR: 2022 (Highlighted reviewer) / 2023 / 2024 / 2025
    • CoLLAs: 2022
    Organisation Comittee
    • CoLLAs: 2022
    Selected Awards
    • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (2020-2023)
    • Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologie (FRQNT) Masters Research Scholarship (2018-2020)
    • McGill Graduate Excellence Award (2018-2020)
    • Ordre des Ingénieurs Foundation Excellence Scholarship (2016)

    A special thanks to this template.