Le Bras, Ronan

Ronan Le Bras is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI. His research interests include generative AI and its evaluation, commonsense reasoning through natural language understanding, as well as computational methods for large-scale combinatorial optimization, reasoning, machine learning and human computation. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2016. Prior to that, he earned an M.S. and a B.S. from Ecole Polytechnique Montreal in Computer Engineering and in Software Engineering.

Positions

  • Now 2020

    Senior Research Scientist

    Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

  • 2020 2016

    Research Scientist

    Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Education

  • Ph.D. 2016

    Ph.D. in Computer Science, Cornell University

    Thesis: Leveraging Human Insights into Problem Structure for Scientific Discovery

  • M.S. 2009

    M.S. in Computer Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Montreal

    Thesis: Applying Probabilistic Message-Passing Algorithms to Search Heuristics for Solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems. *Nominated for the best 2010 University Master’s Thesis*

  • B.Eng. 2008

    B.Eng. in Software Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Montreal

    *Degree with highest honors*

  • C.P.G.E. 2004

    C.P.G.E. in Mathematics and Physics, Lycee Montaigne, Bordeaux

    MPSI (Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering Science), MP* (Mathematics and Physics)

Honors and Awards

  • 2025
    trophy 2025 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention
    Included in the 2025 AI 2000 Global Artificial Intelligence Scholars List and awarded the 2025 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention in the area of AAAI/IJCAI, based on published papers from 2015 to 2024.
  • 2024
    trophy TMLR Finalist for Outstanding Certification
    Finalist for Outstanding Certification (2 awardees and 3 finalists) in 2024 in the Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) journal for the collaborative benchmark paper entitled Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
  • 2023
    trophy EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award
    Outstanding Paper Award (26 out of 1,047 accepted papers) at EMNLP'23 for our paper entitled SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization
  • 2023
    trophy ACL Outstanding Paper Award
    Outstanding Paper Award (39 out of 1,074 accepted papers) at ACL'23 for our paper entitled NLPositionality: Characterizing Design Biases of Datasets and Models
  • 2022
    trophy NAACL Best Paper Award
    Best New Method Paper Award (1 out of 442 accepted papers) at NAACL'22 for our paper entitled NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics
  • 2020
    trophy AAAI Outstanding Paper Award
    Outstanding Paper Award (1 out of 1,591 accepted papers) at AAAI'20 for our paper entitled WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale
  • 2017
    trophy IAAI Innovative Application Paper Award
    Innovative Application Paper Award at IAAI'17 for our paper entitled Phase-mapper: An AI platform to accelerate high throughput materials discovery
  • 2013
    trophy VLDB Best Paper Award
    VLDBJ Invitation for the Special Issue on Best Papers of VLDB 2013 for our paper entitled Cloudia: a deployment advisor for public clouds
  • 2010
    graduation Teaching Award of Excellence
    Award of Teaching Excellence as Teaching Assistant for the course Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Cornell University
  • 2009-10
    scholarship Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship
    Scholarship for Doctorate Studies awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
  • 2010
    graduation Nominated for the best 2010 University Master’s Thesis
    Master of Science in Computer Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Montreal
  • 2009-10
    scholarship FQRNT Masters Research Scholarship
    Scholarship for Masters Studies awarded by the Fonds Quebecois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT)
  • 2009
    scholarship J.A. Deseve Foundation Scholarship
    Scholarship awarded based on Academic Excellence by the J.A. Deseve Foundation
  • 2008-09
    scholarship CIRRELT Scholarship for Excellence in Master’s program
    Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT)
  • 2008
    graduation Bachelor Degree with Highest Honors
    Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Montreal
  • 2004
    scholarship Rotary Foundation Scholarship for Excellence
    Rotary International, The Rotary Foundation

Professional Service

  • PC Member

    AAAI 2011/2017-2021

    CPAIOR 2013

    EMNLP 2023

    IJCAI 2013/2015

    NAACL 2024

  • Reviewer

    AAAI 2010/2011/2013-2015/2017-2022

    Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

    CP 2010/2011/2016

    CPAIOR 2012-2014

    EMNLP 2020/2022

    ICLR 2025

    IJCAI 2013/2015/2020

    INFORMS Journal of Computing

    ITCAI 2010

    Journal of Combinatorial Designs

    Journal of Machine Learning Research

    NAACL/NeuralGen 2019

    NAACL/SemEval 2019

    Nature

    SAT 2013

    SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (SIDMA)

    SoCS 2013/2014

Teaching Experience

  • Spring 2016

    Teaching Assistant, Cornell University

    Head TA for the course Introduction to Analysis of Algorithms

  • Spring 2013

    Guest Lecturer, Cornell University

    Graduate course, Topics in Computational Sustainability

  • Fall 2010

    Teaching Assistant, Cornell University

    Artificial Intelligence, *TA Award of Excellence*

  • Jan-Dec 2007

    Teaching Assistant, HEC Montreal

    Probability and Statistics

  • Jan-Dec 2007

    Teaching Assistant, Ecole Polytechnique Montreal,

    Computer Architecture and Programming Language