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Dane Malenfant speaking at an event

Tānishi, wīpēsākāstēw. I recently completed my MSc thesis in Computer Science at McGill University, conducting my research at Mila – The Québec AI Institute under the supervision of Dr. Blake Richards in the Learning in Neural Circuits (LiNC) lab. I am based in Mile End, Montréal.

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My research has been generously supported computationally by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC), the Innovation, Development and Technologies (IDT) team at Mila, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

Previously, I completed a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, with additional studies in psychology, at McGill University in 2022 as a first-generation student. Before that, I earned a certificate in French as a Second Language from the University of Regina in 2018 and later passed the B2 DELF.

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 use information about their own adaptation dynamics and how those dynamics affect 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 studies, I was involved with Encode Canada, where I contributed to AI literacy and ethics initiatives by writing blog posts for the Montréal AI Ethics Institute and judging hackathons. I also co-led the machine learning division of McGill Neurotech, where we developed a brain–computer interface speller that used EEG responses to visually presented letters. In my final year, I co-authored a paper on causal reasoning in narrative.

Currently, I serve on the advisory board of Indigenous Pathfinders in AI and am a citizen of Métis Nation—Saskatchewan.

Selected News and Updates

  1. I started an AI Engineering and Software internship at Veris AI in New York.
  2. My master’s thesis was approved.
  3. My research, The Challenge of Hidden Gifts in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, was accepted to the third Reinforcement Learning Conference.
  4. Context Beyond the Window, a workshop I am organizing, was accepted to COLM 2026.
  6. I spoke on a panel at the 8th Arctic Observing Summit in Aarhus about reciprocity in multi-agent reinforcement learning.
  7. Reinforcing the World’s Edge was presented at the World Modeling Workshop.
  8. The Challenge of Hidden Gifts was accepted to the European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning.
  9. I won the Best Poster Prize for neuroinformatics and computational modelling at the HBHL Symposium.
  10. I presented work on traditional reciprocity at the Indigenous in AI/ML event at NeurIPS 2024.
  11. I won the Best Master’s Student Poster Prize at MAIN 2024.
  12. I attended the Human-Aligned AI Summer School in Prague, followed by a cultural visit to Berlin.