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Niko Lorantos

University of Massachusetts Amherst
nlorantos (at) umass (dot) edu


I study mathematical computing and philosophy with honors at UMass Amherst. My primary research interests involve open-ended and agentic AI systems. This summer I’ll be building agents for ecosystem modeling at Woodwell Climate and conducting research on AI alignment. In the past I’ve worked on evolutionary algorithms and artificial life with Lee Spector at Amherst College, engineered language models at UMass CICS, and finetuned structural biology models at a biotech startup.

In my free time I enjoy snowboarding, listening to music, and spending time in nature.

Research

  1. arXiv
    Adaptive Exploration in Lenia with Intrinsic Multi-Objective Ranking

    Niko Lorantos, Lee Spector

    arXiv
    We evolve populations of Lenia artificial life through intrinsic objectives to promote diversity, emergent complexity, and open-endedness.
    PDF arXiv Code

  2. GPTP XXII
    Evolution of Artificial Intelligence, Continued

    Lee Spector, Ryan Bahlous-Boldi, Paul Vander Vort, Niko Lorantos

    Genetic Programming Theory & Practice XXII
    We outline significant advancements in AI driven by evolution, particularly in neural architecture design and preference learning.
    Book