Data & AI Leader
Alexander Liss
I've spent twelve years making data and AI useful inside complex organizations, from Fortune 100 enterprises to high-growth product companies. The hardest part is never the technology. It's building the systems, teams, and organizational conditions that make AI reliable and worth trusting.
Along the way I started doing original research, because the production problems I kept running into didn't have good answers yet.
Writing
Writing.
Longer-form thinking on data, AI systems, and what happens when the two collide. Published on Substack.
You are who you meet. So are your agents.
The Agentverse Is Here, but Agents Can't Deliver Your Pizza [Yet]
Test, trace, repeat: experimentation is becoming the engine of self-improving AI
From clicks to cognition: digital experiences are becoming learning systems.
For Humans, love is the drug. But for AI, it's the reward signal.
Research
Research & Frameworks
Original work emerging from production problems. Published work and preprints. Links to PDFs and code where available.
Attention Fine-Tuning (AFT)
The next frontier in AI is models that improve themselves. Every major lab is racing toward systems that evaluate their own outputs, identify weaknesses, and update accordingly, like Google's AlphaEvolve. The problem is the reward signal from RLHF. Human preference labels are expensive, brittle, and external reward shaping too often results in model collapse.
But what if the reward signal was in the model the whole time?
This paper introduces Attention Fine-Tuning (AFT): a post-training framework that derives its reward signal entirely from within the model, with no human labels required. In internal testing as we developed this framework, we achieve significant results including:
- A 9.2% improvement in conversation quality over an SFT baseline on 7,372 test examples
- 95.5% of test examples improved on attentional focus, with 100% improvement on mid- and late-dialogue turns
- A mapping of attractor states that draw conversational systems into semantic collapse
This framework applies to any environment where optimizing an LLM's ability to hold a conversation is critical, including customer service, education, personal assistants, and video games. It allows post-training without manually labelled preference data.
Experience Orchestrator (EO)
In 2026, multi-agent ecosystems are everywhere. OpenClaw, MoltBook, and their successors let agents act autonomously in open-ended environments. And the world is discovering that prompting them toward good behavior doesn't scale. What's missing is a general framework for keeping LLM-based agents aligned with optimal behavior.
This paper presents the Experience Orchestrator, a formal framework for applying control theory to govern large language models as independent agents. In internal testing as we developed this framework, we achieved significant results including:
- Measurable lift of +32 pts in goal completion rate over a naive LLM approach.
- LLMs that move beyond 'annoyingly friendly' defaults toward nuanced, humanlike conversational intent.
- Rich dialogue histories that provide training data for further iteration.
The framework generalizes to any environment where agents must make decisions under partial observability. It provides a way to govern LLM agents through a shared policy, similar to classical multi-agent reinforcement learning, but applicable to the world of OpenClaw.
Background
A bit more about me.
Currently
I'm a data and AI leader focused on the full stack of what it takes to make AI work: strategy and investment cases at the executive level, platform and infrastructure in the middle, and production systems and evaluation frameworks at the ground level.
My research grows directly out of practice. The reward signal problem I kept hitting in production, how do you give an AI system a persistent, measurable sense of whether it's getting better, turned into two active research programs. One looks for the signal inside the model. The other governs the system from above.
I also organize the Denver Data Dudes & Dudettes meetup. Come find us if you're in Denver and thinking about data, AI, or what happens when the two collide.
Education
- MS, Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, AI Specialization (in progress)
- MBA, NYU Stern School of Business, Business Analytics Specialization
- BA, George Washington University, Japanese Language and Literature
Interests
- Reward signal design and post-training methods
- Multi-agent systems and control theory
- Reinforcement learning
- Cognition as a dynamic system
On the side
Listener of Huberman Lab, runner, skier, anime fan, and father of human children and dogs.
Get in touch
Contact.
Happy to chat about research, writing, or collaboration.