Zenna Tavares bio photo

Zenna Tavares

I am the co-founder and president of Basis Research Institute. You can contact me on zenna[at]basis[dot]ai.

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Publications

Preprints

  • Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Games - Lance Ying, Katherine M. Collins, Prafull Sharma, Cedric Colas, Kaiya Ivy Zhao, Adrian Weller, Zenna Tavares, Phillip Isola, Samuel J. Gershman, Jacob D. Andreas, Thomas L. Griffiths, Francois Chollet, Kelsey R. Allen, Joshua B. Tenenbaum - arXiv

  • NeuroAI for AI Safety - Patrick Mineault, Niccolò Zanichelli, Joanne Zichen Peng, Anton Arkhipov, Eli Bingham, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Emily Mackevicius, Adam Marblestone, Marcelo Mattar, Andrew Payne, Sophia Sanborn, Karen Schroeder, Zenna Tavares, Andreas Tolias, Anthony Zador - arXiv

  • How Does the Primate Brain Combine Generative and Discriminative Computations in Vision? - Benjamin Peters, James J. DiCarlo, Todd Gureckis, Ralf Haefner, Leyla Isik, Joshua Tenenbaum, Talia Konkle, Thomas Naselaris, Kimberly Stachenfeld, Zenna Tavares, Doris Tsao, Ilker Yildirim, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte - arXiv

  • The Random Conditional Distribution for Higher-Order Probabilistic Inference - Zenna Tavares, Xin Zhang, Edgar Minasyan, Javier Burroni, Rajesh Ranganath, Armando Solar-Lezama - arXiv

Publications

  • Benchmarking World-Model Learning with Environment-Level Queries - Archana Warrier, Dat Nguyen, Michelangelo Naim, Moksh Jain, Yichao Liang, Karen Schroeder, Cambridge Yang, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Sebastian Vollmer, Kevin Ellis, Zenna Tavares - ICML 2026 - paper

  • Pact: A Choreographic Language for Agentic Ecosystems - Kiran Gopinathan, Jack Feser, Michelangelo Naim, Zenna Tavares, Eli Bingham - 2nd International Workshop on Choreographic Programming (CP 2026) - paper

  • ExoPredicator: Learning Abstract Models of Dynamic Worlds for Robot Planning - Yichao Liang, Dat Nguyen, Cambridge Yang, Tianyang Li, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Adrian Weller, Zenna Tavares, Tom Silver, Kevin Ellis - ICLR 2026 - paper

  • MetaCOG: A Hierarchical Probabilistic Model for Learning Meta-Cognitive Visual Representations - Marlene Berke, Zhangir Azerbayev, Mario Belledonne, Zenna Tavares, Julian Jara-Ettinger - UAI 2024 - paper

  • Combining Functional and Automata Synthesis to Discover Causal Reactive Programs - Ria Das, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Armando Solar-Lezama, Zenna Tavares - POPL 2023 - paper

  • A Language for Counterfactual Generative Models - Zenna Tavares, James Koppel, Xin Zhang, Ria Das, Armando Solar-Lezama - ICML 2021 - paper

  • Synthesizing Programmatic Policies that Inductively Generalize - Jeevana Priya Inala, Osbert Bastani, Zenna Tavares, Armando Solar-Lezama - ICLR 2020 - paper

  • Predicate Exchange: Inference with Declarative Knowledge - Zenna Tavares, Javier Burroni, Edgar Minasyan, Armando Solar-Lezama, Rajesh Ranganath - ICML 2019 - paper

  • Adversarial Inversion for Amortized Inference - Zenna Tavares, Edgar Minasyan, Armando Solar-Lezama - ICML 2017, Implicit Models Workshop pdf

  • Smooth Nondeterministic Arrows - Zenna Tavares, Armando Solar-Lezama - NIPS 2015, Black-Box Inference Workshop (Best Paper) pdf

  • Parametric Inverse Simulation - Zenna Tavares, Armando Solar-Lezama - NIPS 2016, Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference

  • Learning Distribution Sensitive Data Structures - Zenna Tavares, Armando Solar-Lezama - AAAI Spring Symposium 2017

  • Probabilistic Programming by Abstraction Refinement - Zenna Tavares, Armando Solar-Lezama - NIPS 2014, Probabilistic Programming Workshop