About

I am an interdisciplinary scholar studying the science of intelligence and how to make AI models more creative. I'm interested in:

  • Developing AI methods and systems that exhibit creative behavior.
  • Uncovering the fundamental, scientific principles of creativity governing minds and machines.

Previously, I was a visiting researcher at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Berkeley. I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where I studied theoretical computer science.

Recent News

  1. 2/2 papers accepted at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Generative AI & Creativity.

  2. Received the Lambda AI Research Grant.

  3. 🏆 Best Short Paper Award at ICCC 2025 for Transformational Creativity in Science: A Graphical Theory.

  4. Started as a visiting graduate researcher at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley.

  5. Pivoted from ML theory to cognitive science.

Selected Publications

2026

CreativityNeuro teaser figure

CreativityNeuro: Steering Large Language Model Weights to Improve Divergent Thinking

S. Schapiro, C. Francisco Park, F. Sosa, L. R. Varshney

Accepted at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Generative AI & Creativity. Under review, Third Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).

Semantic distance tests prediction-by-construct figure

Do Semantic Distance Tests Actually Predict Creativity in Large Language Models?

S. Schapiro, A. Gladstone, J. Black, H. Ji

Accepted at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Generative AI & Creativity. Under review, 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

Combinatorial Creativity figure

Combinatorial Creativity: A New Frontier in Generalization Abilities

S. Schapiro, S. Shashidhar, A. Gladstone, J. Black, R. Moon, D. Hakkani-Tur, L. R. Varshney

Preprint

2025

Transformational Creativity in Science figure

Transformational Creativity in Science: A Graphical Theory

S. Schapiro, J. Black, L. R. Varshney

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) — Best Short Paper Award

Spark pipeline figure

Spark: A System for Scientifically Creative Idea Generation

A. Sanyal, S. Schapiro, S. Shashidhar, R. Moon, L. R. Varshney, D. Hakkani-Tur

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC)

2024

Towards Understanding the Role of Sharpness-Aware Minimization Algorithms for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

S. Schapiro, H. Zhao

Undergraduate thesis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign