Alex Farhang

Research I’m a PhD candidate at Caltech advised by Professor Yisong Yue. My work focuses on machine learning methods for agentic behavior, including humanlike gameplay in video games and large language model agents for scientific programming.

I am a National Science Foundation Graduate Research (NSF GRFP) Fellow and a Chen Graduate Fellow. I was a Research Intern at Epic Games, advised by Iain Matthews, where I worked on machine learning for video games.

Previous I graduated from Cornell University where I studied neuroscience and behavior. My thesis work with Professor Jesse Goldberg was awarded the Robert R. Capranica Award for the outstanding honors thesis in neuroethology. I then worked with Professor Evan Feinberg at UCSF on sensorimotor computation and Professor Doris Tsao on models for object perception in the brain.

news

Oct 10, 2025	Our work using LLM agents for writing scientific preprocessing code for biological image processing was presented at the COLM LM4SCI workshop (paper)
May 29, 2024	Our work using transformers for agent control in video games was accepted at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG): Humanlike Behavior in a Third-Person Shooter with Imitation Learning
Jul 07, 2022	Our paper Investigating Generalization by Controlling Normalized Margin was accepted at ICML
May 23, 2022	I’m beginning a research internship at Epic Games with Iain Matthews

selected publications

IEEE CoG

Humanlike Behavior in a Third-Person Shooter with Imitation Learning

A. R. Farhang, B. Mulcahy, D. Holden, I. Matthews, and Y. Yue

IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2024

DOI Bib HTML PDF Website

@article{farhang2024Humanlike,
  title = {Humanlike Behavior in a Third-Person Shooter with Imitation Learning},
  author = {Farhang, A. R. and Mulcahy, B. and Holden, D. and Matthews, I. and Yue, Y.},
  journal = {IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1109/CoG60054.2024.10645651},
}

ICML

Investigating Generalization by Controlling Normalized Margin

A. R. Farhang, J. Bernstein, K. Tirumala, Y. Liu, and Y. Yue

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022

Bib HTML PDF

@article{farhang2022margin,
  title = {Investigating Generalization by Controlling Normalized Margin},
  author = {Farhang, A. R. and Bernstein, J. and Tirumala, K. and Liu, Y. and Yue, Y.},
  journal = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2022},
}