CV

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Southern California

Computer Science

Master of Science

University of Alberta

Computing Science

Bachelor of Technology

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Electrical Engineering

Red-Teaming Vision-Language-Action Models via Quality Diversity Prompt Generation for Robust Robot Policies

Srikanth, S., Liang, F., Hsu, Y. C., Bhatt, V., Zhao, S., Chen, H., Tjanaka, B., Hwang, M., Saran, A., Seita, D., Tabrez, A., Nikolaidis, S.

(under review)

Algorithmic Prompt Generation for Diverse Human-like Teaming and Communication with Large Language Models

Srikanth, S., Bhatt, V., Zhang, B., Hager, W., Lewis, C.M., Sycara, K.P., Tabrez, A., and Nikolaidis, S.

(under review)

Improving Human-Robot Interaction via a Population of Synthetic Human-like Teams

Srikanth, S., Bhatt, V., Lewis, C.M., Sycara, K.P., Tabrez, A., and Nikolaidis, S.

Second Workshop on Generative Modeling Meets Human-Robot Interaction (GenAI-HRI) at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)

QD-MAPPER: A Quality Diversity Framework to Automatically Evaluate Multi-Agent Path Finding Algorithms in Diverse Maps

Qian, C., Zhang, Y., Bhatt, V., Fontaine, M. C., Nikolaidis, S., and Li, J.

(under review)

Systematic Generation of Diverse Teams for Improved Multi-Agent Collaboration

Hedayatian, S.*, Bhatt, V.*, Tjanaka, B., Lewis, C.M., Sycara, K.P., and Nikolaidis, S.

(under review)

Efficient Quality Diversity Optimization with Monte Carlo Bayesian Sampling

Palmas, M., Bhatt, V., Zhao, S., Nikolaidis, S., Lange, R., and Klauck, M.

Poster at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)

Guidance Graph Optimization for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding

Zhang, Y., Jiang, H., Bhatt, V., Nikolaidis, S., and Li, J.

Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)

Arbitrarily Scalable Environment Generators via Neural Cellular Automata

Zhang, Y., Fontaine, M. C., Bhatt, V., Nikolaidis, S., and Li, J.

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Surrogate Assisted Generation of Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios

Bhatt, V., Nemlekar, H., Fontaine, M.C., Tjanaka, B., Zhang, H., Hsu, Y. C., and Nikolaidis, S.

Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)

Multi-Robot Coordination and Layout Design for Automated Warehousing

Zhang, Y., Fontaine, M. C., Bhatt, V., Nikolaidis, S., and Li, J.

Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)

Deep Surrogate Assisted Generation of Environments

Bhatt, V.*, Tjanaka, B.*, Fontaine, M. C.*, and Nikolaidis, S.

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Inference-based Deterministic Messaging For Multi-Agent Communication

Bhatt, V. and Buro, M.

Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

An Analysis of Frame-skip in Reinforcement Learning

Kalyanakrishnan, S., Aravindan, S., Bagdawat, V., Bhatt, V., Goka, H., Gupta, A., Krishna, K., and Piratla, V.

arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.03718

Software-Level Accuracy Using Stochastic Computing With Charge-Trap-Flash Based Weight Matrix

Bhatt, V., Shrivastava, S., Chavan, T., and Ganguly, U.

Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

Sparsity Enables Data and Energy Efficient Spiking Convolutional Neural Networks

Bhatt, V., and Ganguly, U.

Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN)

Research Assistant

University of Alberta, Canada

Worked on modeling human behavior in strategic games. Collected human behaviour data using Amazon Mechanical Turk and analyzed it through behavioural game theory models.

Intern

Samsung Electronics, South Korea

Created a prototype for a smart home monitoring system using anomaly detection.

Intern

Philips, India

Developed a framework to automatically generate lip-sync animations and emotions in a 3D avatar given a text to speak, as a part of a virtual chatbot.

Deep Learning and its Applications

University of Southern California

Introduction to Robotics

University of Southern California

Intelligent Agents

University of Alberta

Reinforcement Learning Specialization

University of Alberta on Coursera

Introduction to the Foundations of Computation

University of Alberta

Partial Differential Equations

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Scenario Generation as a Tool for Robust Intelligent Agents

IIT Bombay

Generating Scenarios with Surrogate Models

USC Summer Robotics Seminar Series

Quality Diversity Scenario Generation for Robust Intelligent Agents

USC Theta Tau Professor Research Event (on behalf of the ICAROS Lab)

Environment Generation for Generalizable Robots

EGG workshop at RSS 2023

Training Multiple Intelligent Agents to Communicate

Tea Time Talks 2019, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta

The StarCraft 2 ML Environment

AIIDE-18 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Strategy Games (joint talk with Arta Seify)

Demonstrated the work on diverse collaborative LLM agents at RSS 2025 and to DARPA.

Demonstrated robot research on behalf of the ICAROS Lab at the USC Ginsburg Hall ribbon ceremony.

Represented ICAROS Lab in the Robotics Open House 2024, showing robot demos to K-12 students.

Led the organization of the first workshop on Environment Generation for Generalizable Robots (EGG) at RSS 2023.