Who's behind Agentist

Agentist is a daily read on the agent frontier, published by Parallight — a research-and-engineering team from Silicon Valley, headquartered in San Mateo, California. Over 2,000 engineers have trained at Parallight and in the founder's earlier programs, across 13 countries on four continents.

The Founder

Marvin Gao · Minquan Gao

Founder & CEO, Parallight (KeploreAI Inc.)

Marvin Gao is an AI scientist and founder whose research spans multi-agent reinforcement learning, agentic systems, and robot learning, with work published in JMLR, IEEE TPAMI, ICRA, and AAAI. He created MARLlib, a widely used library for multi-agent reinforcement learning, and is first author of GUIDES, on instructor-distilled embeddings for robot-policy enhancement. His Red Teaming Game introduced a game-theoretic framework for red-teaming language models.

Before Parallight he was a Senior AI Scientist at IBM and worked at Ant Financial and Alibaba, shipping AI into banking and national infrastructure, and he earlier founded and sold an ed-tech platform. He studied at Peking University and Johns Hopkins University. Today he is building the training ground for the people who command AI.

Selected publications

• MARLlib: a scalable, efficient multi-agent RL library. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2023.
• Red-teaming language models as a multi-round, multi-agent game. IEEE TPAMI — originating from “Red Teaming Game” (2023).
• GUIDES: instructor-distilled embeddings for robot-policy enhancement (first author). IEEE ICRA, 2025.
• Prompt to transfer: sim-to-real for traffic-signal control. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024.