Blake Olson

M.S. Student, UT Austin

blakeolson@utexas.edu

Bio

I am an incoming master's student at The University of Texas at Austin, focusing on the planning and reasoning abilities of large language models. Specifically, I am interested in reinforcement learning and post-training to improve reasoning ability.

My most recent work measures the planning and reasoning abilities of language models over several different benchmarks. We introduce Sys2Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates existing inference-time techniques on eleven diverse tasks across five categories.

Publications

2025

Complex LLM Planning via Automated Heuristics Discovery

Hongyi Ling*, Shubham Parashar*, Sambhav Khurana*, Blake Olson, Anwesha Basu, Gaurangi Sinha, Zhengzhong Tu, James Caverlee, Shuiwang Ji

arXiv preprint, 2025

Paper

Inference-Time Computations for LLM Reasoning and Planning: A Benchmark and Insights

Shubham Parashar*, Blake Olson*, Sambhav Khurana*, Eric Li*, Hongyi Ling, James Caverlee, Shuiwang Ji

arXiv preprint, 2025

Paper Code

Fragment and Geometry Aware Tokenization of Molecules for Structure-Based Drug Design Using Language Models

Cong Fu*, Xiner Li*, Blake Olson, Heng Ji, Shuiwang Ji

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025

Paper Code

(* indicates equal contribution)

Vitæ

Full Resume in PDF.

Blake Olson
blakeolson@utexas.edu