Wasu Top Piriyakulkij

Hi! I’m Top Piriyakulkij. I’m a fourth-year Computer Science PhD student at Cornell University, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Kevin Ellis. I’m also currently a student researcher at Google DeepMind, working with Kevin Murphy and Wolfgang Lehrach. (And yes, I intend to keep my Kevin collaboration streak going). I’m broadly interested in AI agents that learn efficiently and generalize systematically, much like humans. My current work focuses on world modeling, where my goal is to develop agents that actively build abstract world models in a continual learning fashion. To achieve this, I tend to use techniques such as probabilistic inference and program synthesis.

Before Cornell, I did my undergraduate degree at Brown University, where I double majored in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Back then, I worked on machine learning system with Stephen Bach.

In addition to doing research, I’m also starting to write blogs on LLMs and AI and publish Github projects. Since the birth of AI in 1950s, never before have we seen the field be driven this much by the commercial sector. So I write less formal blogs and release open-source projects hoping they’d be beneficial for non-academic readers and also keeping myself in the loop with what’s going on in the industry.

Selected publications

2025

NeurIPS 2025
(Spotlight)

PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts

Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Yichao Liang, Hao Tang, and 3 more authors

In NeurIPS, 2025

arXiv Bib Website

@inproceedings{piriyakulkij:poeworld25,
  author = {Piriyakulkij, Wasu Top and Liang, Yichao and Tang, Hao and Weller, Adrian and Kryven, Marta and Ellis, Kevin},
  title = {PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS}
}

2024

NeurIPS 2024

Doing Experiments and Revising Rules with Natural Language and Probabilistic Reasoning

Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Cassidy Langenfeld, Tuan Anh Le, and 1 more author

In NeurIPS, 2024

arXiv Bib PDF

@inproceedings{piriyakulkij:experiments24,
  author = {Piriyakulkij, Wasu Top and Langenfeld, Cassidy and Le, Tuan Anh and Ellis, Kevin},
  title = {Doing Experiments and Revising Rules with Natural Language and Probabilistic Reasoning},
  year = {2024},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS}
}

2023

NeurIPS FMDM
Workshop 2023

Active Preference Inference using Language Models and Probabilistic Reasoning

Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Volodymyr Kuleshov, and Kevin Ellis

In NeurIPS FMDM Workshop, 2023

arXiv Bib PDF

@inproceedings{piriyakulkij:active23,
  author = {Piriyakulkij, Wasu Top and Kuleshov, Volodymyr and Ellis, Kevin},
  title = {Active Preference Inference using Language Models and Probabilistic Reasoning},
  year = {2023},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS FMDM Workshop}
}