About Me
I am a fourth year PhD candidate at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 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 RL algorithms that use efficient policy evaluation for improved safety and performance.
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 during the summers of 2026 and 2025, respectively.
Prior to my PhD, I spent three 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: Sept 2026)
- - (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 UMass Amherst.
- - (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, UMass Amherst.
- - (Sept 2023) I am excited to begin my MS-PhD journey at UMass Amherst.
- - (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.