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 2026
Sept 2026

Joining ... Stay Tuned :P

July 2026

Finished PhD Defense ! Slides: "Toward Reliable Supervision for Foundation Models"

May 2026

Received Outstanding Achievement Award (2025-2026) from UMD.

May 2026

Scheduling Thoughts accepted at ICML 2026.

April 2026

VisAlign and EnsemW2S accepted at ACL 2026.

Mar 2026

OC-PRM accepted as a poster at the AFAA Workshop @ ICLR 2026 — with a recommendation of Oral from the AC.

Mar 2026

VisAlign accepted as a poster at the MM Intelligence Workshop @ ICLR 2026.

Dec 2025

Prelim exam done! Officially a PhD candidate! Slides: Towards Reliable Reasoning and Alignment in Large Models.

2025

Paper on uncertainty-aware answer selection across multiple LLMs accepted at EMNLP 2025.

2025

One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025.

Spring 2025

Completed a Fall '24–Spring '25 internship at Capital One on reward hacking in reasoning LLMs.

Summer 2024

Completed a summer internship at Dolby on reducing hallucinations in video LLMs.

2023

Amazon internship paper accepted at Interspeech 2023.

03

Publications

The Hidden Bias of Process Reward Models: PRISM for Rewarding the Right Reasoning

Aakriti Agrawal, Souradip Chakraborty, Armin Saghafian, Nihal Sharma, Rizal Fathony, Nam H. Nguyen, C. Bayan Bruss, Amrit Singh Bedi, Furong Huang

In review · NeurIPS 2026

VeriGate: Verifier-Gated Step-Level Supervision for GRPO

Aakriti Agrawal, Minghui Liu, Furong Huang

In review · NeurIPS 2026

Scheduling Thoughts: Learning the Order of Thought in Diffusion Language Models

J. Xu*, M. Liu*, Aakriti Agrawal, Y. Chen, Furong Huang

ICML 2026

Uncertainty-Aware Answer Selection for Improved Reasoning in Multi-LLM Systems

Aakriti Agrawal, Rohith Aralikatti, Anirudh Satheesh, Amrit Singh Bedi, Furong Huang

EMNLP 2025

EnsemW2S: Can an Ensemble of SoTA LLMs be Leveraged to Obtain a Stronger LLM?

Aakriti Agrawal, Mucong Ding, Zora Che, Chenghao Deng, Anirudh Satheesh, John Langford, Furong Huang

ACL 2026 SafeGenAI @ NeurIPS 2024

Easy2Hard-Bench: Standardized Difficulty Labels for Profiling LLM Performance and Generalization

Mucong Ding*, Chenghao Deng*, Jocelyn Choo, Zichu Wu, Aakriti Agrawal, Avi Schwarzschild, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, John Langford, Anima Anandkumar, Furong Huang

NeurIPS 2024 · Datasets Track

Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings

Aakriti Agrawal, Gouthaman KV, Rohith Aralikatti, Gauri Jagatap, Jiaxin Yuan, Vijay Kamarshi, Andrea Fanelli, Furong Huang

ACL 2026 MM Intelligence @ ICLR 2026

WAVES: Benchmarking the Robustness of Image Watermarks

Bang An*, Mucong Ding*, Tahseen Rabbani*, Aakriti Agrawal, Yuancheng Xu, Chenghao Deng, Sicheng Zhu, Abdirisak Mohamed, Yuxin Wen, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang

ICML 2024 Paper

PoisonedParrot: Subtle Data Poisoning Attacks to Elicit Copyright-Infringing Content from Large Language Models

Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess, Pankayaraj Pathmanathan, Yigitcan Kaya, Zora Che, Bang An, Sicheng Zhu, Aakriti Agrawal, Furong Huang

NAACL 2025 SafeGenAI @ NeurIPS 2024

Robustness to Multi-Modal Environment Uncertainty in MARL using Curriculum Learning

Aakriti Agrawal, Rohith Aralikatti, Yanchao Sun, Furong Huang

MASEC @ NeurIPS 2023 Paper Code

Learning When to Trust Which Teacher for Weakly Supervised ASR

Aakriti Agrawal, Milind Rao, Anit Kumar Sahu, Gopinath (Nath) Chennupati, Andreas Stolcke

Interspeech 2023 Paper

Revisiting Parameter Sharing in Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

J. K. Terry, Nathaniel Grammel, Sanghyun Son, Benjamin J. Black, Aakriti Agrawal

RTAW: An Attention Inspired Reinforcement Learning Method for Multi-Robot Task Allocation in Warehouse Environments

Aakriti Agrawal, Amrit Singh Bedi, Dinesh Manocha

ICRA 2023 Paper Code

DC-MRTA: Decentralized Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Navigation in Complex Environments

Aakriti Agrawal, Senthil Arul Hariharan, Amrit Singh Bedi, Dinesh Manocha

IROS 2022 Paper

Accurate Estimation of 3D-Repetitive-Trajectories using Kalman Filter, Machine Learning and Curve-Fitting for High-Speed Target Interception

Aakriti Agrawal, Aashay Bhise, Rohitkumar Arasanipalai, Lima Agnel Tony, Shuvrangshu Jana, Debasish Ghose

Book chapter Paper

Mid-Flight Propeller Failure Detection and Control of Propeller-Deficient Quadcopter using Reinforcement Learning

Rohitkumar Arasanipalai*, Aakriti Agrawal*, Debasish Ghose

A Comparative Study of Noise Cancellation Using LMS Adaptive Filter and RNN Filter

Aakriti Agrawal, Rohitkumar Arasanipalai, B. Sainath

ICEPE 2018 Paper