Essam Sleiman

Essam Sleiman

I run Canvas Labs (YC), where we work on self-improving AI. We recently open-sourced meta-agent, a framework for agent continual learning.

Previously, I did research on continual learning, language-model interpretability, and vision-language models at Amazon Science and as a grad student at Harvard, with papers at ECCV and CVPR. In my free time, I enjoy basketball, coffee, and hiking around SF.

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Selected Projects

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Founder, Canvas Labs (YC F24) Meta-Agent: Open-Source Framework for Agent Continual Learning
1. Continual Learning for Agents blog 2. Reward Modeling as Harness Optimization blog
3. AutoHarnessBench coming soon
blog code agents self-improving ai
Research Engineer at Amazon Science Continual Self-Supervised Learning with Knowledge Distillation Essam Sleiman*, Xiangbo Li, Saad Ali · Preprint, 2023 Continual self-supervised learning for Twitch video embeddings, leveraging knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting across time periods.
paper continual learning self-supervised
Goldfish long-video retrieval framework architecture
Research, Harvard Goldfish: Vision-Language Understanding of Arbitrarily Long Videos Essam Sleiman* (Contributor) · ECCV 2024 Vision-language understanding for arbitrarily long videos using retrieval to select relevant clips before answering questions.
paper code vision-language long video
Research, Harvard & MIT Do Function Vectors Factor Task and Distribution? Essam Sleiman*, Jacob Andreas · Preprint, 2024 Studying whether in-context learning representations in LLMs can be decomposed into separable task and distribution components.
paper code interpretability in-context learning
SlowFormer energy attack on vision transformers
Research, UC Davis SlowFormer: Adversarial Robustness for Efficient Vision Transformers Essam Sleiman*, K L Navaneet*, et al. · CVPR 2024 Adversarial robustness for efficient vision transformers: small universal patches break adaptive inference, while adversarial training helps recover robustness.
paper code robustness vision transformers

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