About Me

I am Sean McLeish, a third year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Maryland advised by Tom Goldstein. I graduated from the University of Warwick in 2023 with a first class BSc (Hons) in Discrete Mathematics. My research currently focuses on algorithmic reasoning and language modelling.

Selected Publications [Full List]

Teaching Pretrained Language Models to Think Deeper with Retrofitted Recurrence
Sean McLeish, Ang Li, John Kirchenbauer, Dayal Singh Kalra, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Avi Schwarzschild, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein and Micah Goldblum
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Efficient Reasoning
paper | code | Hugging Face

Gemstones: A Model Suite for Multi-Faceted Scaling Laws
Sean McLeish, John Kirchenbauer, David Yu Miller, Siddharth Singh, Abhinav Bhatele, Micah Goldblum, Ashwinee Panda and Tom Goldstein
NeurIPS 2025
paper | code | Hugging Face

Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach
Jonas Geiping, Sean McLeish, Neel Jain, John Kirchenbauer, Siddharth Singh, Brian Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Abhinav Bhatele and Tom Goldstein
NeurIPS 2025
paper | code | Hugging Face

The CLRS-Text Algorithmic Reasoning Language Benchmark
Larisa Markeeva*, Sean McLeish*, Borja Ibarz*, Wilfried Bounsi, Olga Kozlova, Alex Vitvitskyi, Charles Blundell, Tom Goldstein, Avi Schwarzschild and Petar Veličković
ICML DMLR Workshop 2024
paper | code | Hugging Face

Transformers Can Do Arithmetic with the Right Embeddings
Sean McLeish*, Arpit Bansal*, Alex Stein, Neel Jain, John Kirchenbauer, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Abhinav Bhatele, Jonas Geiping, Avi Schwarzschild and Tom Goldstein
NeurIPS 2024
paper | code

[Re] End-to-End Algorithm Synthesis with Recurrent Networks: Logical Extrapolation Without Overthinking
Sean McLeish and Long Tran-Thanh
ReScience Volume 9 Issue 2, Journal to Conference Track NeurIPS 2023
paper | code

Experience

Summer 2025, Applied Research Intern, Capital One
Spring 2025, Spring into Quant Finance, G Research
Summer 2022, Summer Intern, Goldman Sachs
Spring 2021, Spring Intern, Goldman Sachs

Achievements

University of Maryland Dean’s Fellowship (2023)
Department prize for the best overall graduating BSc student in Discrete Mathematics (2023)
UKMT Gold Award Winner (2019)

Services

Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICLR

Contacts

smcleish [ at ] umd [dot] edu

Iribe Center, Office 2116
8125 Paint Branch Dr,
College Park, MD 20742