About Me

Hello! I’m Sapana, an Applied Scientist at Amazon, specializing in reinforcement learning (RL). I focus on developing solutions for complex decision-making challenges in Generative AI systems.

I received my doctorate from Texas A&M University (TAMU) working with Dr. Dileep Kalathil. At TAMU, I focussed on making AI systems safe by including various notions of safety in online learning, RL, and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Previously, I was a research fellow at MPI-SWS, Germany with Dr. Adish Singla. I also did a MS (Research) at IIT Madras with Dr. Balaraman Ravindran and Dr. Radha Krishna Ganti.

Aside from work, I like to hike, cook, paint, and photograph.

News

• [Sep 2024] Paper on Risk Averse RLHF accepted to Neurips 2024!
• [Sep 2024] Paper on Pedagogical Alignment of LLMs accepted to EMNLP 2024!
• [Aug 2024] Joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an Applied Scientist!
• [Aug 2023] Paper on Safe distributed OCO accepted to TMLR!
• [May 2023] Back in Seattle for an Applied Scientist intern at Amazon!
• [Apr 2023] Accepted to IJCAI 2023 Doctoral Consortium!
• [Feb 2023] New paper on Safe distributed OCO out on arxiv!
• [Feb 2023] Gave an invited talk on ‘Adaptivity and safety in sequential decision making’ at Rice University!
• [Sep 2022] Paper on meta-RL in sparse reward environments accepted to NeurIPS 2022!
• [Aug 2022] Spent a wonderful summer in Seattle as an Applied Scientist intern at Amazon!
• [Dec 2021] Paper on Safe online convex optimization accepted to AAAI 2022!