About Me

Hello! I am Sapana. I received my doctorate from Texas A&M University (TAMU) working under Dr. Dileep Kalathil. I am passionate about making Artificial Intelligent (AI) systems safe. At TAMU, my research primarily focused on including various notions of safety in online learning, reinforcement learning, and more recently, reinforcement learning from human feedback.

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

• [Feb 2024] Paper on Pedagogical Alignment of LLMs out on arxiv!
• [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!