 
        Peter Shaw
Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
Google Scholar · Twitter · Bluesky · LinkedIn
Publications
          AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories 
          
          CoLM 2025 · Website
        
          ALTA: Compiler-Based Analysis of Transformers 
          
          TMLR 2025 · Code
        
          ProtEx: A Retrieval-Augmented Approach for Protein Function Prediction 
          
          MLCB 2025 (Oral) · Code
        
          Robust Preference Optimization through Reward Model Distillation 
          
          TMLR 2025
        
          BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language 
          
          ICML 2024
        
          Helping or Herding? Reward Model Ensembles Mitigate but do not Eliminate Reward Hacking 
          
          CoLM 2024
        
          From Pixels to UI Actions: Learning to Follow Instructions via Graphical User Interfaces 
          
          NeurIPS 2023 (Spotlight) · Code 
        
          QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations 
          
          ACL 2023 · Outstanding Paper Award · Code · Dataset
        
          Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding 
          
          ICML 2023 · Code
        
          Generate-and-Retrieve: use your predictions to improve retrieval for semantic parsing 
          
          COLING 2022
        
          Evaluating the Impact of Model Scale for Compositional Generalization in Semantic Parsing 
          
          EMNLP 2022
        
          Improving Compositional Generalization with Latent Structure and Data Augmentation 
          
          NAACL 2022 · Code
        
          Learning to Generalize Compositionally by Transferring Across Semantic Parsing Tasks 
          
          arXiv 2021
        
          Visually Grounded Concept Composition 
          
          EMNLP 2021 (Findings)
        
          Systematic Generalization on gSCAN: What is Nearly Solved and What is Next? 
          
          EMNLP 2021 · Code
        
          Graph-Based Decoding for Task Oriented Semantic Parsing 
          
          EMNLP 2021 (Findings)
        
          Unlocking Compositional Generalization in Pre-trained Models Using Intermediate Representations 
          
          arXiv 2021 · Code
        
          Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both? 
          
          ACL 2021 · Code
        
          Exploring Unexplored Generalization Challenges for Cross-Database Semantic Parsing 
          
          ACL 2020 · Code 
        
          Answering Conversational Questions on Structured Data without Logical Forms 
          
          EMNLP 2019
        
          Generating Logical Forms from Graph Representations of Text and Entities 
          
          ACL 2019
        
          Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations 
          
          NAACL 2018 · Code
        
* indicates equal contribution.
About
Broadly, my research focuses on machine learning. I have worked on evaluating and improving generalization in neural models, developing retrieval-augmented systems, and combining neural models with structured components and environments.
Previously, I worked on query understanding for Google Search, where I led the development and deployment of neural models for semantic parsing. Before joining Google in 2015, I was the technical lead and manager of the embedded software team at MakerBot, developing 3D printers and scanners. I graduated summa cum laude from Villanova University with a combined Bachelor's and Master's in Electrical Engineering.