Seth Karten

I am a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University advised by Chi Jin. My research develops methods and evaluations for multi-agent systems (zero-sum and general-sum), generalized harnesses for embodied agents, and economic alignment and safety. I study foundation agents that perform closed-loop decision-making in open-ended environments at scale, using complex environments to stress-test fundamentals while enabling rich real-world applications.

Seth Karten
News
Mar 2026
🎉 Honored to receive a Tinker Research Grant from Thinking Machines supporting my research on foundation agents.
Feb 2026
🎉 Honored to receive a Google DeepMind research grant supporting my work on generalized harnesses for embodied agents.
Dec 2025
🏆 The PokeAgent Challenge wrapped up with our workshop at NeurIPS 2025, sponsored by Google DeepMind and IJCAI AIJ.
Oct 2025
🎤 I gave a lightning talk on PokéChamp and the PokeAgent Challenge at the 5th Annual Rutgers Robotics Workshop 2025.
Aug 2025
🎤 I gave a lightning talk at UC Berkeley's Agentic AI Summit on PokéChamp and the PokeAgent Challenge.
Jul 2025
PokéChamp received a Spotlight Award at ICML 2025 and is the first Pokemon battling paper at ICML, ICLR, or NeurIPS.
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
Economic Alignment
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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
NeurIPS Algorithmic Collective Action Workshop, 2025
Agent Harnesses
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PokéChamp: An Expert-level Minimax Language Agent
Seth Karten, Andy Nguyen, Chi Jin
ICML (Spotlight), 2025
Evaluations & RL Environments
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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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GameDevBench: Evaluating Agentic Capabilities Through Game Development
Wayne Chi, Yixiong Fang, Arnav Yayavaram, Siddharth Yayavaram, Seth Karten, Qiuhong Anna Wei, Runkun Chen, Alexander Wang, Valerie Chen, Ameet Talwalkar, Chris Donahue
arXiv preprint, 2026
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Automatic Generation of High-Performance RL Environments
Seth Karten, Rahul Dev Appapogu, Chi Jin
arXiv preprint, 2026
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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
Robotics
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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

A complete paper index with metadata, abstracts, and BibTeX is available on Research. A lightweight machine-readable guide is also available at llms.txt.