technical contributions
- Same Scene, Different Answer: Variance and Rollout Budgets for Flow-Policy Evaluation, NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Trust-AI-Eval (TAE), with RoboRigor, an open-source paired evaluation harness for VLA policies.
- First author, PathCluster: Pedestrian Group-Adaptive Social Navigation in Dense Crowds, IROS 2025 (with Aniket Bera).
- MIRACLE: Inverse Reinforcement and Curriculum Learning Model for Human-inspired Mobile Robot Navigation, arXiv 2023 (with Kshitij Tiwari and Aniket Bera).
- Founder of Phyvant: specialized enterprise AI with verified organizational context.
- Helped build RLHF and model quality systems at Mercor.
interests
Generalist robot policies. AI agents that do real work.
non-professional interests
- Chess (competitive play and puzzles)
- Basketball (playing and watching)
- Snowboarding (winter slopes and powder)
- Hiking (trying to do more of this)
- Origami (started as a focus thing, now I just like it)
- Anime and manga (Steins Gate, Vinland Saga, Monster)
- Meeting people building things that matter
contact
nihalgunukula@gmail.com. I read everything.