Seth Karten

I am a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University advised by Chi Jin. My current research interests involve studying multi-agent interaction and open-ended learning at scale to enable autonomous agents in simulated civilizatons. I am interested in using foundation models (such as large language models) and reinforcement learning for decentralized decision-making that can scale individual preferences to group behavior.

Seth Karten
News
Dec 2025
🏆 NeurIPS 2025 Competition Track: The PokeAgent Challenge is now live and sponsored by Google DeepMind! Check out the competition website.
Aug 2025
🎤 I gave a lightning talk at UC Berkeley's Agentic AI Summit unveiling PokéChamp—an expert-level minimax LLM agent that battles like a pro with zero fine-tuning—and the PokeAgent Challenge.
Jul 2025
PokéChamp received a Spotlight Award at ICML 2025!
Jun 2024
🎯 I presented a poster on The LLM Economist: Optimizing Policy in Multiagent Generative Simulations at the Cooperative AI Summer School.
May 2023
🏆 I am excited to announce that I have been awarded Princeton's Francis Robbins Upton Fellowship in Engineering!
Mar 2023
🌟 I am excited to announce that I have been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP)!
Selected Publications
Generative Simulacra
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LLM Economist: Large Population Models and Mechanism Design in Multi-Agent Generative Simulacra
Seth Karten, Wenzhe Li, Zihan Ding, Samuel Kleiner, Yu Bai, Chi Jin
arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.15815, 2025
Agents in Games
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The PokeAgent Challenge: Competitive and Long Context Learning at Scale
Seth Karten, Jake Grigsby, Stephanie Milani, Kiran Vodrahalli, Amy Zhang, Fei Fang, Yuke Zhu, Chi Jin
NeurIPS Competition Track, 2025
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PokéChamp: An Expert-level Minimax Language Agent
Seth Karten, Andy Nguyen, Chi Jin
ICML (Spotlight), 2025
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FightLadder: A Benchmark for Competitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Wenzhe Li, Zihan Ding, Seth Karten, Chi Jin
ICML, 2024
Emergent Communication
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Towards True Lossless Sparse Communication in Multi-Agent Systems
Seth Karten, Mycal Tucker, Siva Kailas, Katia Sycara
ICRA, 2023
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Interpretable Learned Emergent Communication for Human-Agent Teams
Seth Karten, Mycal Tucker, Huao Li, Siva Kailas, Michael Lewis, Katia Sycara
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 2023
Autonomous Vehicles
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Improving Kinodynamic Planners for Vehicular Navigation with Learned Goal-Reaching Controllers
Aravind Sivaramakrishnan, Edgar Granados, Seth Karten, Troy McMahon, Kostas E. Bekris
IROS, 2021