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Maarten Sap

I am an assistant professor at CMU's LTI department with a courtesy appointment in HCII, and a part-time research scientist and AI safety lead at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). My research focuses on (1) measuring and improving AI systems' social and interactional intelligence, (2) assessing and combatting social inequality, safety risks, and socio-cultural biases in human- or AI-generated language, and (3) building narrative language technologies for prosocial outcomes. I was named a Packard Fellow in 2025.

I received my PhD from the University of Washington where I was advised by Noah Smith and Yejin Choi.
[bio for talks]

Recent updates:

October 2025 🏅⭐: I’m super excited and grateful to announce that I'm part of the 2025 class of Packard Fellows. The Packard Foundation and this fellowship will allow me to explore exciting research directions towards culturally responsible and safe AI 🌍🌈

October 2025 🔍🧑‍🎓: Due to my lab being quite full already, I'm not taking looking for any new students in this upcoming PhD application cycle 😟.

October 2025 🇨🇦🎉: Excited to be attending COLM 2025 in Montreal this October! I'll be giving a talk at the Social Sim Workshop on Unlocking Social Intelligence in AI agents. I'm also thrilled that five papers I co-authored will be presented by my amazing collaborators at COLM: HAICOSYSTEM: An Ecosystem for Sandboxing Safety Risks in Human-AI Interactions (led by Xuhui Zhou et al.), ALFA: Aligning LLMs to Ask Good Questions: A Case Study in Clinical Reasoning (co-led by Jimin Mun et al.), PolyGuard: A Multilingual Safety Moderation Tool for 17 Languages, Fluid Language Model Benchmarking, and The Delta Learning Hypothesis: Preference Tuning on Weak Data can Yield Strong Gains.

August 2025 🌟: Incredibly honored to be one of 7 US recipients of the 2025 Okawa Research Grant from the Okawa Foundation!

August 2025 🧑‍🎓: Welcoming my first postdoc, Vasudha Varadarajan, to the lab!

August 2025 👨🏼‍🏫: Excited to give a (virtual) talk about Responsible AI for Diverse Users and Cultures at the Gender Bias in NLP workshop at ACL 2025!

July 2025 🧠🛡️: Five papers were accepted to COLM 2025! Highlights include HAICOSYSTEM, a framework for sandboxing safety risks in human-AI interaction; ALFA, which aligns LLMs to ask better clinical questions; and PolyGuard, a multilingual moderation tool for unsafe content. Two other papers to be released soon :)

[older news]

My research group:

Dan Chechelnitsky

LTI PhD student
co-advised with Chrysoula Zerva

Joel Mire

LTI PhD student

Karina Halevy

LTI PhD student
co-advised with Mona Diab

Jimin Mun

LTI PhD student

Jocelyn Shen

MIT PhD student
co-advised with Cynthia Breazeal

Kynnedy Smith
(*co-advised with Motahhare Eslami)

HCII PhD student

Vasudha Varadarajan

LTI Postdoc

Akhila Yerukola

LTI PhD student

Mingqian Zheng

LTI PhD student
co-advised with Carolyn Rosé

Xuhui Zhou

LTI PhD student

Overarching Research Themes

Themes extracted and images generated with the OpenAI API; there may be inconsistencies.

Ethics and Responsible AI

My research group explores the ethical implications and responsible use of AI technologies in various domains. Noteworthy contributions in this area include the paper on [*Let Them Down Easy!*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00195), which investigates the contextual effects of LLM guardrails on user perceptions, and the work titled [*Stay True to the Evidence*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07257), focusing on measuring belief entrenchment in reasoning models. Additionally, we examine how AI can engage with diverse human values through the paper [*Particip-AI*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14791), offering insights into anticipating potential harms and benefits of AI applications.

Exploring Narrative Dynamics

My research group explores the intricacies of narrative structures and their impacts on audience perceptions. An important study, [*Quantifying the narrative flow of imagined versus autobiographical stories*](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211715119), examines how different story formats affect emotional responses. Another significant paper, [*HEART-felt Narratives*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17633), delves into empathy and narrative style by analyzing personal stories with LLMs, emphasizing the role of narrative in fostering emotional connections.

AI Agents and Social Intelligence

My research group explores the development and evaluation of AI agents exhibiting social intelligence in interactive environments. A crucial contribution is found in the study [*SoMi-ToM*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23046), which evaluates multi-perspective Theory of Mind abilities in social interactions. We also highlight the work titled [*SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11667), presenting methodologies to assess social reasoning in language models, further advancing our understanding of social dynamics in AI.

Human-Centered AI Design

My research group explores strategies for designing AI systems that prioritize human needs and interactions. The paper [*AI-LieDar*](https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.595/) investigates the trade-offs between utility and truthfulness in AI agents, emphasizing the importance of user experience in AI design. Furthermore, our research in [*User-Driven Value Alignment*](https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00862) highlights methods for understanding user perceptions and addressing biases within AI companions, crucial for creating systems that are more aligned with user values.

More about me