About Me
I am a fourth year PhD candidate at University of Massachusetts, working on reinforcement learning (RL). I have the fortune to work under Prof. Scott Niekum. At UMass, I have also had the opportunity to closely collaborate with Prof. Philip Thomas. My research mainly focuses on designing efficient RL algorithms from first-principles.
During my PhD, I have interned at Amazon Kiro Science under Dr. Manish Prajapat and at Adobe Research under Dr. Nikos Vlassis and Dr. Jayakumar Subramanian.
Prior to my PhD, I spent three productive years at Adobe (India) developing solutions to industry-scale machine learning problems (2020-2023). I have a BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras (2016-2020).
In my leisure time, I like to hang out with my friends, read books, write "something", and explore places.
A note to potential collaborators
I am open to collaborate on ideas that apply non-convex optimization techniques to policy gradients.
News
(Last updated: Oct 2026)
- - (Oct 2026) My internship work at AWS AI Labs is out on ArXiv: "Projected Distillation: On Learning to Solve Hard Problems from Close, Correct Targets"
- - (Oct 2026) I was recognized as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2026!
- - (Oct 2026) "Convex-Concave Reinforcement Learning" is available publicly on ArXiv now. (This is probably my best work so far :)
- - (Sept 2026) Two NeurIPS workshop acceptances: one on a new distillation technique and another on a study of Hinglish tokenizers.
- - (Sept 2026) COSAC work with Adobe Research is accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
- - (July 2026) Our work on impact of human annotator's beliefs on RLHF got published at TMLR.
- - (May 2026) "COSAC: Counterfactual Credit Assignment in Sequential Cooperative Teams" preprint published on arXiv.
- - (April 2026) I will join as a summer research intern at Amazon AWS AI Lab. The focus of research will be coding AI agents.
- - (Sept 2025) "Evaluation-aware Reinforcement Learning" preprint published on arXiv.
- - (Sept 2025) Poster presentation by our group at the annual Undergraduate Research Voluntary (URV) exhibition at the University of Massachusetts.
- - (Mar 2025) I will join Adobe Research, CA as a research intern. My work will focus on multi-agent LLM systems.
- - (May 2024) Our team demonstrated a navigation robot serving beverages at the LLAMA Group of Labs, University of Massachusetts.
- - (Sept 2023) I am excited to begin my MS-PhD journey at the University of Massachusetts.
- - (Jan 2023) I am thrilled to share that my work on explainability of RL agents got accepted at ICLR 2023.
- - (Nov 2022) My work on image-based search in documents got accepted at WACV 2023.
- - (Aug 2020) I am excited to join Adobe India's Media and Data Science Research group.
- - (May 2020) I graduated from IIT Madras with a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering.
- - (Jan 2020) My internship work got accepted at ICLR 2020.