Shravan Nayak

Hi! I’m Shravan Nayak. I am a PhD student in computer science at Mila and the University of Montreal supervised by Prof. Aishwarya Agrawal. My research focuses on cultural understanding in AI systems i.e. how AI can recognize, respect, and adapt to different cultural perspectives. I believe this is crucial not only for creating AI that is inclusive, safe, and fair but also for tackling broader challenges such as pluralistic alignment and improving its ability to handle complex real-world scenarios (robustness).

Currently, I am particularly interested in:

1. Understanding how diverse human perspectives shape AI systems and developing methods to integrate these perspectives effectively while ensuring robust evaluation in real-world scenarios (CulturalVQA, CulturalFrames).
2. Exploring how cultural understanding can serve as a framework to tackle key challenges like pluralistic alignment, multilingualism, and long-tailed robustness.

I also spend part of my time working on Computer-use Agents. I built the UI-Vision benchmark for evaluating perception and planning in computer-use agents, the GroundCUA dataset for grounding these systems, and the GroundNext series of SOTA computer-use grounding agents.

Prior to starting my graduate studies, I spent two years at Microsoft, contributing to the PowerPoint mobile team. If you’ve ever used PowerPoint on your iPad or mobile phone, chances are you’ve encountered my work! Before joining Mila, I worked on dubbing at LT Lab in Hamburg, machine translation for low-resource languages at the University of Toronto and reinforcement learning at IISc Bangalore.