Thao Pham

Computational Math & Information Science @ Berea College

I'm a final-year undergraduate student at Berea College, United States. I'm concerned about risks from advanced AI systems, which I'm primarily motivated to study safety and cooperation in multi-agent settings. My research interests ponder questions like:

  • How can we evaluate and detect multi-agent scheming ability?
    • Can we effectively model Bayesian Theory of Mind in multi-LLM-agents settings to study scheming behavior?
  • How can we study LLM-based agents' cooperative properties, or steer their aspirations towards human values, in open-ended environments?

Besides research, I contribute to expand the AI Safety community, e.g., founding the AI Safety Initiative at Berea College, and facilitating for Center for AI Safety. For more details, please refer to my CV.

Feel free to contact me via phamt2@berea.edu, schedule a chat (I'm always looking for new research collaborators), or consider leaving me anonymous feedback.

Update

Aug 15, 2025
I joined Jinesis AI Lab as a part-time Pre-Doctoral Student Researcher, supervised by Zhijing Jin, UToronto, working on Open Source Game Theory.
Jul 23, 2025
I gave a lightning talk on my on-going research on multi-agent deception at the Human-aligned AI Summer School 2025.
Jul 10, 2025
I presented my poster on my ongoing research on multi-agent deceptive behavior modeling at the Cooperative AI Summer School 2025.
May 30, 2025
I began my Open Philanthropy-funded research project on capability in multi-agent systems, mentored by Lewis Hammond from the Cooperative AI Foundation.
Apr 4, 2025
Our paper, APriCoT, accepted at CogSci 2025.
Feb 24, 2025
I attended AAAI-UC 2025, presenting my research on test-taking strategies in LLMs.
Sep 20, 2024
Two papers, Base-Rate Effect on LLM Benchmark Performance and Large Language Model Recall Uncertainty, accepted to EMNLP 2024 and CoNLL 2024.
May 6, 2024
I began my research internship at Vanderbilt University in studying human-like LLMs, mentoring by Douglas Fisher, Jesse Roberts, and Kyle Moore.

Research interests

Scheming, Theory of Mind, Multi-agent Safety, Game Theory, Collective Intelligence, Cooperative AI.

Other interests

(Intersectional) Feminism, Writing-is-Thinking, Poetry, Effective Altruism, Anti-colonialism, Humanism, Animal Welfare, Photography, Religion, Neuroscience, Board Games.