Dane Malenfant

Tānishi, wīpēsākāstēw. I am a second year MSc. research student in Computer Science at McGill University and Mila - The Québec AI Institute, and very fortunately supervised by Dr. Blake Richards in the Learning in Neural Circuits (LiNC) lab.

My current research has been generously funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Indigenous Studies Program at McGill University, and supported computationally by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC) and the Innovation, Development and Technologies (IDT) team at Mila.

Previously, I completed a bachelors in computer science with psychology at McGill University in 2022 as a first generation student and, before that, a certificate in French as a Second Language at the University of Regina in 2018. I also passed the B2 DELF shortly after.

Research Interests

• Cooperation and Coordination in multi-agent environments, with a particular focus on formalizing what constitutes an agent in an interactive environment.
• The Credit Assignment Problem in learning systems, especially in its structural, temporal, and long-horizon forms.
• Self-Monitoring in gradient-based systems, focusing on how learning systems represent and make use of information about their own adaptation dynamics or how those dynamics effect the learning process.
• AI Safety for adaptive agents, motivated by the inevitability of continual learning in real-world environments and focused on preserving behavioural control under ongoing adaptation.

During my undergraduate, I was associated with Encode Canada where I contributed to AI literacy and ethics initiatives with blogs posts in the Montréal AI Ethics Institute and hackathon judging, co-lead the machine learning division of McGill Neurotech where we created a brain-computer interface speller that learned EEG signals of flashing letter frequency to type by focusing on letters with vision and co-authored a causal language reasoning paper in my last year.

Currently, I am an advisory board member of Indigenous Pathfinders in AI and evidently I am a citizen of Métis Nation—Saskatchewan.

Selected News and Updates

• May 2026 A workshop I am organizing was accepted to the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) 2026! We hope to bring together researchers on context management.

• April 2026 I received the Tiplady Sweeney Fellowship

• April 2026 I am speaking on a panel at the 8th Arctic Observing Summit (AOS 2026) in Aarhus, Denmark about my work in reciprocity in multi-agent reinforcement learning.
  

• February 2026 My idea was presented at the World Modelling Workshop Reinforcing the World’s Edge: A Continual Learning Problem in the Multi-Agent-World Boundary.
  

• August 2025 The challenge of hidden gifts was accepted to the European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning EWRL.
  

• May 2025 I won best poster prize for neuroinformatics and computational modelling at the HBHL Symposium.
  

• December 2024 I presented results of my ongoing traditional reciprocity at the Indigenous in AI/ML event at NeurIPS 2024.
  

• October 2024 I won best masters student poster prize at MAIN 2024.
  

• July 2024 I attended the Human Aligned AI summer school in Prague, Czechia! Then I went to Berlin to vist friends and for the museums, art and culture.