PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ronan Le Bras

Ronan Le Bras is a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) whose work covers commonsense reasoning, the evaluation of generative AI and fully open language models. After degrees at Ecole Polytechnique Montréal, he earned a computer science PhD at Cornell University and joined Ai2 as a Research Scientist in 2016. The WinoGrande commonsense benchmark he coauthored won an AAAI Outstanding Paper Award in 2020. He went on to coauthor Tulu 3 in 2024, the Delphi paper in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2025, and the Olmo 3 model family in 2025.

Works
188
Citations
8,022
h-index
37
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2008–2016

    From Montréal to a Cornell PhD

    He earns a B.Eng. in Software Engineering with highest honors in 2008 and an M.S. in Computer Engineering in 2009 at Ecole Polytechnique Montréal, where his master's thesis applies probabilistic message-passing algorithms to search heuristics for constraint satisfaction problems. He then studies in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, with research interests that include computational sustainability and combinatorial optimization, and completes his PhD in 2016 with the thesis "Leveraging Human Insights into Problem Structure for Scientific Discovery".

  2. 2016

    Research scientist at Ai2

    He joins the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) as a Research Scientist in 2016, a title he keeps until 2020.

  3. 2017

    An IAAI award for Phase-Mapper

    In 2017, a paper he coauthors on Phase-Mapper, an AI platform to accelerate high throughput materials discovery, receives the Innovative Application Paper Award at IAAI.

  4. 2020

    The WinoGrande benchmark

    In 2020, he coauthors WinoGrande with Keisuke Sakaguchi, Chandra Bhagavatula and Yejin Choi, a dataset of 44k problems inspired by the Winograd Schema Challenge and adjusted to improve its scale and hardness. The paper wins an Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI.

  5. November 2024

    Tulu 3 open post-training

    In November 2024, he is among the coauthors of Tulu 3, a family of fully open post-trained models released with its data, code and training recipes. Its training algorithms include supervised finetuning, Direct Preference Optimization and a novel method called Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards.

  6. January 2025

    Delphi in Nature Machine Intelligence

    Nature Machine Intelligence publishes "Investigating machine moral judgement through the Delphi experiment" in January 2025, with him among its coauthors. The paper builds and tests Delphi, an open-source AI system trained to predict the moral judgements of US participants.

  7. December 2025

    The Olmo 3 model family

    In December 2025, he is a coauthor of Olmo 3, a family of fully open language models at the 7B and 32B parameter scales from the Olmo team. The release includes the full lifecycle of the models, with every stage, checkpoint, data point and dependency used to build them.

  8. As of October 2026

    Senior Research Scientist at Ai2

    He is a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, a position he has held since 2020. His research interests include generative AI and its evaluation, commonsense reasoning through natural language understanding, and computational methods for large-scale combinatorial optimization.

Career

  1. Since 2016Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Research Scientist, Senior Research Scientist
  2. 2020–2023University of Washington

Education

  1. 2016Cornell UniversityPhD
  2. 2009Polytechnique MontréalM.S. in Computer Engineering
  3. 2008Polytechnique MontréalB.Eng. in Software Engineering

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning2021 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · 1,212 citationsWith Ari Holtzman
  2. ATOMIC: An Atlas of Machine Commonsense for If-Then Reasoning2019 · 773 citationsWith Maarten Sap and Noah Smith
  3. PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language2020 · 666 citationsWith Jianfeng Gao
  4. WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale2020 · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 484 citations
  5. WinoGrande2021 · Communications of the ACM · 347 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Ronan Le Bras. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  4. 72% of AI researchers with top works connect into a single 2,592-person co-author groupIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We map the co-author network across 3,593 people shaping AI and 14,977 most-cited papers: 2,592 (72%) form one connected group with a median distance of 5 steps, led in 2-step reach by Yoshua Bengio (570) and in shortest-path bridging by Yoshua Bengio (6.7%).

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ronan Le Bras yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Ronan Le Bras' Personal Page rlebras.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Ronan Le Bras' Webpage cs.cornell.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale ojs.aaai.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Investigating machine moral judgement through the Delphi experiment nature.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Olmo 3 arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.