ErfanMiahi

I 'm a research scientist at Pluralis, working on decentralized RL post-training, where the rollouts come from machines spread across the internet instead of one datacenter. In July we post-trained an 8B mixture-of-experts model with 14 Macs in four countries generating rollouts and one B200 training it. Held-out pass@1 on PaperSearchQA went from 29% to 63%.

Before Pluralis I was at Covenant AI, where I helped build Covenant-72B, the largest permissionless pre-training run at its release, and Grail, an open RL post-training system for LLM reasoning. There I also wrote PULSE, which cuts weight-sync traffic in distributed RL by over 100×. It was accepted at NeurIPS 2026, and Fireworks cites it in their write-up of the infrastructure behind Cursor's Composer 2 RL run.

Before that I was the founding ML research engineer at DeepR Analytics, a Toronto proprietary-trading firm, where I built its RL trading pipeline. I did my M.Sc. at the University of Alberta's RLAI Lab (Richard Sutton's lab), supervised by Martha White and Marlos C. Machado, and worked with Google DeepMind on how neural network representations behave in RL.

Outside work I skydive (60 jumps so far), fly in wind tunnels, do parkour and run long distances. I keep going back to Nietzsche's philosophy and Jung's analytical psychology.

268

Citations, Oct 2026

11

Papers

100×

Less weight-sync traffic

29→63%

Pass@1 with 14 Macs

72B

Parameters in Covenant-72B

10+

Mentees since 2017