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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 2025 Packard Fellow and a recipient of the 2025 Okawa Research Award.

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

Recent updates:

December 2025 🏅📃: Very excited to have our paper Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond) selected for a Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2025 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track)!! Huge congrats to the first author Liwei Jiang!!!

November 2025 💎🚀: Honored to be a Spring 2025 recipient of the Amazon Research Award for our project on measuring AI agentic safety!

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!

[older news]

My research group:

Dan Chechelnitsky

CMU Portugal 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

HCII PhD student
co-advised with Motahhare Eslami

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 Exploration

My research group explores the complexities of ethical frameworks necessary for the safe deployment of AI systems. A particularly noteworthy paper, [OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06134), proposes a structured approach to evaluating the safety of AI agents in real-world applications. Additionally, the study [PluriHarms: Benchmarking the Full Spectrum of Human Judgments on AI Harm](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08951) highlights diverse human perspectives on potential harms associated with AI technologies, emphasizing the importance of inclusivity in AI ethics. Together, these contributions aim to ensure that AI implementations are aligned with societal values and deliver equitable outcomes.

Narrative Reasoning and Emotional Engagement

My research group explores the role of narratives in shaping human perception and emotional responses in AI contexts. An important study, [Social Story Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Narrative Intent and Reception](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15925), examines how narrative structures influence audience understanding and emotional engagement with content. Furthermore, the paper [HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17633) investigates how narrative styles impact empathy in AI-generated stories, providing insight into the potential for AI to connect with users on a deeper emotional level. These findings underline the importance of narrative in augmenting AI interactions.

Social Intelligence and AI Interactions

My research group explores the dynamics of social intelligence within AI systems, especially in the context of interactive agents. The paper [SoMi-ToM: Evaluating Multi-Perspective Theory of Mind in Embodied Social Interactions](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23046) offers an innovative approach to assess how AI can comprehend various social perspectives, crucial for enhancing user engagement. Another significant work, [SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11667), proposes a framework for evaluating social understanding in language models, highlighting the intersection of social dynamics and AI. These studies contribute to advancing the realism and effectiveness of social AI agents.

Combating Bias and Toxicity in AI

My research group explores innovative solutions to reduce bias and toxicity in AI systems, addressing societal concerns about fairness and representation. The study [PolyGuard: A Multilingual Safety Moderation Tool for 17 Languages](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04377) illustrates an approach to ensure safety and moderation across diverse linguistic contexts, showcasing the importance of inclusivity. Additionally, [Mind the Gesture: Evaluating AI Sensitivity to Culturally Offensive Non-Verbal Gestures](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17710) sheds light on the need for AI to be attuned to cultural nuances that might lead to unintentional harm. Together, these works aim to cultivate a more responsible and empathetic AI landscape.

More about me