Elephant Rock Lab · AI Research

Understanding intelligence.
Building what comes next.

ERLab is an independent research lab working on reasoning, multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and alignment. We publish openly and build in the open.

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Researchers & engineers
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Research programs
Research

What we work on

Six programs, one goal: making machine intelligence more capable, more understandable, and more trustworthy.

Reasoning in LLMs

How large language models plan, verify, and self-correct. We study chain-of-thought dynamics, search, and methods that make multi-step reasoning reliable.

chain-of-thoughtplanningself-correction

Multimodal Learning

Vision–language models that ground language in perception. Focus areas: visual reasoning, document understanding, and efficient cross-modal alignment.

vision-languagegroundingVQA

Agents & Tool Use

LLM agents that plan long horizons, call tools, and recover from failure. We build benchmarks and study memory, exploration, and credit assignment.

planningtoolsmemory

Alignment & Safety

Making capable systems behave as intended. Evaluations, interpretability of internal representations, and robustness to distribution shift.

evalsinterpretabilityrobustness

Efficient Training

Getting more capability per FLOP. Scaling laws, data curation, distillation, and post-training recipes for small but strong models.

scaling lawsdistillationdata

Open Science

Reproducible research as infrastructure. We release benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, and open weights whenever we can.

benchmarksreproducibilityopen weights
Publications

Recent papers

A selection of our latest work. The full list lives in our publication archive.

News

What's happening at the lab

Sep 2026
Lab

ERLab opens its new research site — welcome to erlab.dev

Our new home on the web, with the full publication archive and open-source releases in one place.

Aug 2026
Release

AgentBench-X v2 released with 12 new open environments

Long-horizon tool-use evaluation, now with per-step credit assignment and a public leaderboard.

Jul 2026
Paper

Two papers accepted at ICML 2026 — one Oral

Verifiers as Teachers was selected for an oral presentation. See you in Seoul.

Jun 2026
People

Spring intern applications are open

We're looking for research interns in reasoning and alignment. Applications close October 1.

Team

The people behind the papers

A small, senior team of researchers and engineers who like hard problems and short feedback loops.

EV

Dr. Elena Vasquez

Director
Reasoning · Alignment
MC

Dr. Marcus Chen

Research Scientist
LLM reasoning
PS

Dr. Priya Sharma

Research Scientist
Interpretability
DO

David Okafor

Research Engineer
Agents · Infra
SR

Sofia Rossi

Research Scientist
Efficient training
YT

Yuki Tanaka

PhD Researcher
Multimodal learning
AK

Amina Khalil

Research Engineer
Evaluation systems
+You

This could be you

Open position
Join us

Do the best work of your career here

We hire researchers and engineers who want their work to matter — openly published, openly reviewed, and used by the community.

Research ScientistResearch InternResearch EngineerVisiting Researcher
[email protected]