Aakriti Agrawal
PhD, CS, UMD (2021–2026)
Advisor: Prof. Furong Huang
Dissertation: "Toward Reliable Supervision for Foundation Models" — Slides
I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Dinesh Manocha at the start of my PhD, focusing on multi-agent RL and robotics. Previously, I was a RA with Prof. Debasish Ghose at IISc Bangalore working on RL and drones. Prior to that, I completed my bachelor's thesis with Prof. Nicolas Padoy in France and graduated from BITS Pilani with a degree in EEE.
Contact
Reach out if you'd like to collaborate or if you are a student looking for mentorship or a general discussion — agrawal5@umd.edu
01
Research interest
I am an AI safety researcher focused on building reliable and aligned AI systems, especially for improved reasoning, continual learning, and agentic deployment. I specialize in post-training (RL/SFT), identifying agentic misalignment and safety vulnerabilities, and improving the factuality and groundedness of frontier models.
Aligned and Safe Reasoning in LLMs: identifying hidden bias in process reward models and mitigating reward hacking and downstream policy misalignment in large reasoning models (LRMs), safer process supervision for policy learning (GRPO, RLHF, PPO) and policy search. I am interested to extend effective process-supervision for better reasoning and planning as my primary research interest.
Superalignment and Multi-LLM System: improving scalable oversight and weak-to-strong generalization with multiple LLMs, multi-LLM reasoning and LLM evaluation using uncertainty-aware answer selection for diverse LLMs.
Interpretability and Multimodal Robustness: reducing hallucinations in vision-language models through refined textual embeddings, studying diffusion language models for better reasoning, and improving robustness in multimodal systems.
I also have background in multi-agent reinforcement learning, robotics, and speech applications.
02
Recent news
Updated Sept 2026Joining ... Stay Tuned :P
Finished PhD Defense ! Slides: "Toward Reliable Supervision for Foundation Models"
Received Outstanding Achievement Award (2025-2026) from UMD.
Scheduling Thoughts accepted at ICML 2026.
VisAlign and EnsemW2S accepted at ACL 2026.
OC-PRM accepted as a poster at the AFAA Workshop @ ICLR 2026 — with a recommendation of Oral from the AC.
VisAlign accepted as a poster at the MM Intelligence Workshop @ ICLR 2026.
Prelim exam done! Officially a PhD candidate! Slides: Towards Reliable Reasoning and Alignment in Large Models.
Paper on uncertainty-aware answer selection across multiple LLMs accepted at EMNLP 2025.
One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
Completed a Fall '24–Spring '25 internship at Capital One on reward hacking in reasoning LLMs.
Completed a summer internship at Dolby on reducing hallucinations in video LLMs.
Amazon internship paper accepted at Interspeech 2023.
03