Karen Hambardzumyan / mahnerak

PhD Student @ FAIR (Meta) and UCL NLP (University College London)

Supervised by amazing Jakob Foerster and Pontus Stenetorp

Developing AI Research Agents at FAIR@MSL, Meta

Primary Maintainer of Aim

Ex: YerevaNN, USC ISI, Yerevan State University

Research

🤖

AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents
Preprint, 2026

Karen Hambardzumyan*, Nicolas Baldwin*, Edan Toledo*, Rishi Hazra*, Michael Kuchnik*, and 20 othersBassel Al Omari, Thomas Simon Foster, Anton Protopopov, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Michael Shvartsman, Alisia Lupidi, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Parth Pathak, Tatiana Shavrina, Despoina Magka, Hela Momand, Derek Dunfield, Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Carole-Jean Wu, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Yoram Bachrach, Martin Josifoski*

🧪

AIRS-Bench: a Suite of Tasks for Frontier AI Research Science Agents
Preprint, 2026

Alisia Lupidi*, Bhavul Gauri*, Thomas Simon Foster*, Bassel Al Omari*, Despoina Magka*, and 32 othersAlberto Pepe, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Muna Aghamelu, Nicolas Baldwin, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Chee Hau Leow, Sandra Lefdal, Hossam Mossalam, Abhinav Moudgil, Saba Nazir, Emanuel Tewolde, Isabel Urrego, Jordi Armengol Estape, Amar Budhiraja, Gaurav Chaurasia, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Karen Hambardzumyan, Daniel Izcovich, Martin Josifoski, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Parth Pathak, Michael Shvartsman, Edan Toledo, Anton Protopopov, Roberta Raileanu, Alexander Miller, Tatiana Shavrina, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach

🏅

AI Research Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench
NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight)

Edan Toledo*, Karen Hambardzumyan*, Martin Josifoski*, Rishi Hazra, Nicolas Baldwin, and 20 othersAlexis Audran-Reiss, Michael Kuchnik, Despoina Magka, Minqi Jiang, Alisia Maria Lupidi, Andrei Lupu, Roberta Raileanu, Kelvin Niu, Tatiana Shavrina, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Michael Shvartsman, Shagun Sodhani, Alexander H. Miller, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Carole-Jean Wu, Pontus Stenetorp, Nicola Cancedda, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Yoram Bachrach

⚡

The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements
NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks

Bingchen Zhao*, Despoina Magka*, Minqi Jiang*, Xian Li, Roberta Raileanu, and 18 othersTatiana Shavrina, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Kelvin Niu, Shagun Sodhani, Michael Shvartsman, Andrei Lupu, Alisia Lupidi, Edan Toledo, Karen Hambardzumyan, Martin Josifoski, Thomas Foster, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Alexander H. Miller, Oisin Mac Aodha, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach

🎮

Combining Code Generating Large Language Models and Self-Play to Iteratively Refine Strategies in Games
IJCAI 2025

Yoram Bachrach*, Edan Toledo, Karen Hambardzumyan, Despoina Magka, Martin Josifoski, and 9 othersMinqi Jiang, Jakob Foerster, Roberta Raileanu, Tatiana Shavrina, Nicola Cancedda, Avraham Ruderman, Katie Millican, Andrei Lupu, Rishi Hazra

💡

What Does It Take to Be a Good AI Research Agent? Studying the Role of Ideation Diversity
Preprint, 2025

Alexis Audran-Reiss*, Jordi Armengol-Estapé, Karen Hambardzumyan, Amar Budhiraja, Martin Josifoski, and 15 othersEdan Toledo, Rishi Hazra, Despoina Magka, Michael Shvartsman, Parth Pathak, Justine T Kao, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Bhavul Gauri, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Emanuel Tewolde, Jenny Zhang, Taco Cohen, Yossi Adi, Tatiana Shavrina, Yoram Bachrach

🛡️

With Great Backbones Comes Great Adversarial Transferability
Preprint, 2025

Erik Arakelyan*, Karen Hambardzumyan*, Davit Papikyan, Pasquale Minervini, Albert Gordo, Isabelle Augenstein, Aram H. Markosyan

💂

Robust LLM safeguarding via refusal feature adversarial training
ICML 2025

Lei Yu*, Virginie Do, Karen Hambardzumyan, Nicola Cancedda

🔬

LM Transparency Tool: Interactive Tool for Analyzing Transformer Language Models
ACL 2024 Demo Track

Igor Tufanov*, Karen Hambardzumyan, Javier Ferrando, Elena Voita

📈

Scaling Laws for Generative Mixed-Modal Language Models
ICML 2023

Armen Aghajanyan*, Lili Yu*, Alexis Conneau, Wei-Ning Hsu, Karen Hambardzumyan, Susan Zhang, Stephen Roller, Naman Goyal, Omer Levy, Luke Zettlemoyer

🧫

BARTSmiles: Generative Masked Language Models for Molecular Representations
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling

Gayane Chilingaryan*, Hovhannes Tamoyan*, Ani Tevosyan*, Nelly Babayan, Lusine Khondkaryan, Karen Hambardzumyan, Zaven Navoyan, Hrant Khachatrian, Armen Aghajanyan

🌀

WARP: Word-level Adversarial ReProgramming
ACL 2021

Karen Hambardzumyan*, Hrant Khachatrian and Jonathan May

🉐

YerevaNN's Systems for WMT20 Biomedical Translation Task: The Effect of Fixing Misaligned Sentence Pairs
WMT 2020 Shared Task Winner

Karen Hambardzumyan*, Hovhannes Tamoyan and Hrant Khachatrian

🧬

BioRelEx 1.0: Biological Relation Extraction Benchmark
BioNLP 2019 Workshop @ ACL

Hrant Khachatrian*, Lilit Nersisyan, Karen Hambardzumyan, Tigran Galstyan, Anna Hakobyan, Arsen Arakelyan, Andrey Rzhetsky and Aram Galstyan

🔍

Natural Language Inference over Interaction Space
As part of ICLR 2018 Reproducibility Challenge

Martin Mirakyan*, Karen Hambardzumyan and Hrant Khachatrian.

🚬

Towards JointUD: Part-of-speech Tagging and Lemmatization using Recurrent Neural Networks
CoNLL 2018 Shared Task

Gor Arakelyan*, Karen Hambardzumyan and Hrant Khachatrian.

🐎

CleverHans v2.1.0 Adversarial Examples Library
Technical Report

Nicolas Papernot*, Fartash Faghri, Nicholas Carlini, I. Goodfellow, Reuben Feinman, Alexey Kurakin, Cihang Xie, Yash Sharma, T. Brown, Aurko Roy, Alexander Matyasko, Vahid Behzadan, Karen Hambardzumyan, and 13 othersZhishuai Zhang, Yi-Lin Juang, Zhi Li, Ryan Sheatsley, Abhibhav Garg, Jonathan Uesato, W. Gierke, Y. Dong, David Berthelot, P. Hendricks, Jonas Rauber, Rujun Long, P. Mcdaniel

Links

Résumé

(last updated: Nov 2025)
mahnerak-CV.pdf