Varun Sreedhara Bhatt

Ph.D. Student, ICAROS Lab, University of Southern California

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I am a Ph.D. student with Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis in the Computer Science department at the University of Southern California. Prior to my Ph.D., I completed my M.Sc. at the University of Alberta with Prof. Michael Buro and B.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

My main research goal is to build robust and generalizable intelligent agents that work well alongside humans and other intelligent agents. Towards that end, I have been working on methods to generate diverse and challenging environments via a combination of generative models and quailty diversity optimization.

Outside of research, I mostly spend time on gaming and occasionally on hiking and travel. I am also a fan of puzzles, so there is a good chance you will find me solving variant sudokus during work breaks!

Selected publications

  1. dsas.gif
    Surrogate Assisted Generation of Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios
    Varun Bhatt, Heramb Nemlekar, Matthew C. Fontaine, Bryon Tjanaka , Hejia Zhang, Ya-Chuan Hsu, and Stefanos Nikolaidis
    In Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) , 2023
    arXiv Code Presentation
  2. dsage.png
    Deep Surrogate Assisted Generation of Environments
    Varun Bhatt, Bryon Tjanaka, Matthew C. Fontaine, and Stefanos Nikolaidis
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) , 2022
    arXiv Code Presentation Website