Aditeya Prajapati
01 / Introduction
Aditeya Prajapati at a historic building

M.S. Computer Science (AI) · University of Southern California

I build machine learning systems that make robots more reliable.

I am an embodied AI researcher at USC working on policy routing, robust robot evaluation, and learning from limited data. I build systems that turn ambitious ideas into robots that work beyond the lab.

I currently work with Jesse Thomason in USC’s GLAMOR Lab and Erdem Bıyık in the LIRA Lab. My work brings together offline reinforcement learning, vision-language-action models, and robust perception for real-world robotics.

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02 / Research

Research interests

Policy routing

I build systems that choose the best controller at each step, instead of asking one robot policy to solve every part of a task.

Embodied AI

I study how generalist robot models can connect language and visual perception to reliable, grounded action.

Robustness

I develop failure detectors and safety probes that identify when a robot’s view, instruction, or environment has shifted.

Sim-to-real transfer

I use targeted contrast sets and simulation data to test what actually transfers before a model reaches a real robot.

03 / Publications

Publications

Selected academic work across robot learning, multimodal AI, and socio-technical systems.

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  1. In preparation

    Motion Complements Appearance: Pose-Augmented Self-Supervised Fusion for Isolated Sign Language Recognition

    Aditeya Prajapati, Jesse Thomason · Target: CVPR 2026

  2. Submitted

    SWAP: Stepwise Action Policy Routing for Vision-Language-Action Models

    Mousumi Das, Aditeya Prajapati, Abrar Anwar, Jesse Thomason · CoRL 2026

  3. Submitted

    SAFECAST: Robust Failure Detection for VLA Policies with Contrast-Set Training and Calibration

    H. B. Rajaprakash, Aditeya Prajapati, R. Xue, Abrar Anwar, Jesse Thomason · CoRL 2026

  4. To appear

    Topic Modeling and Opinion Analysis on Hyperloop Twitter Data Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

    K. Pandit, Aditeya Prajapati, S. Jain, S. Fernandes, A. R. Shandliya, M. Saeed · HAICON 2026

  5. To appear

    Sentiment Analysis of Indian Hyperloop Tweets for Opinion Inversion Prediction

    K. Pandit, S. Jain, P. Sharma, Aditeya Prajapati, U. Chaurasiya, M. Saeed · HAICON 2026

  6. Accepted

    A Resilient Network Blueprint for Wireless Communication in Hyperloop Systems

    A. Shandilya, V. Dongre, Aditeya Prajapati, et al. · SN Computer Science, Springer Nature

  7. 2025

    Case Studies: Responsible IIoT Implementations: Smart Bin Waste Prediction Using Machine Learning

    Aditeya Prajapati, S. Uchil, V. Patwa, N. Kapadia, R. G. Mehta · CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group

04 / Experience

Experience

Jan 2026 to present

Research Assistant · GLAMOR Lab, USC

Developing SWAP, an offline-RL policy router that switches among VLA and control policies during robot manipulation. On DROID tasks and Libero, this work improved real-world task success by up to 33% and shortened successful trajectories by 28.3%.

Jul 2026 to present

Research Assistant · LIRA Lab, USC

Exploring LLM-regularized social attention for trajectory forecasting. The approach reduces displacement error by 7% in low-data Argoverse 2 settings while making learned attention more aligned with interaction-critical agents.

Jun 2024 to Dec 2025

Machine Learning Researcher · FYND / PixelBin

Built production generative-AI image systems, computer vision pipelines, and cloud services. My work helped process more than one million images and reduced physical model-generation overhead by 40%.

Dec 2022 to Jan 2023

Data Analyst Intern · Reliance Industries

Built LSTM forecasting models from high-frequency telemetry and an internal conversational AI assistant for operational support.

05 / Education

Education

University of Southern California

M.S. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence)

Jan 2026 to Dec 2027 · Los Angeles, CA

University of Mumbai

B.Tech in Information Technology

Aug 2020 to May 2024 · Mumbai, India
06 / Toolkit

Toolkit

ML: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, scikit-learn, CUDA

Robotics: Offline RL, OpenVLA, Libero, DROID, Franka Control Interface

Systems: Python, C++, SQL, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, SLURM

07 / About
A childhood photo of Aditeya Prajapati
Me, before I learned that every answer comes with three new ablations.

A little more personally

I care about technology that is useful outside a demo: systems that people can understand, trust, and build on. My path from Mumbai to Los Angeles has taken me through computer vision, language, large-scale data, and robotics, and I enjoy the process of connecting ideas across those areas.

Outside the lab, I love sports and have played volleyball at the state level. It has taught me the same things I value in research: preparation, communication, adapting under pressure, and showing up for the team.

Currently seeking research internships, research collaborations, and machine learning roles.