Yogesh Kulkarni
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Media and Immersive Experience (MIX) Center 50 N Centennial Way, Room 350 Mesa, AZ 85201
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Mail code: 5802Campus: Tempe
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Student Information
Graduate StudentComputer Science
Ira A Fulton Engineering
I am a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI), Arizona State University, advised by Dr. Pooyan Fazli and part of the People and Robots Laboratory (PeRL). My research focuses on enhancing the reasoning and alignment of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for Video Understanding through efficient, self-supervised preference optimization and reinforcement learning (GRPO).
Previously, I graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) with a Master's in Computer Science. At USC, I was a Graduate Research Assistant at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), where I worked with 3D Point Clouds—particularly at the intersection of GANs, Diffusion Models, and Gaussian Splatting for style transfer. In Summer 2023, I had the privilege to intern at Nokia Bell Labs, where I contributed to efficient geo-distributed LLM training across heterogeneous clusters.
My journey began with a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology. I grew up in New Delhi, India.
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science — Arizona State University (Ongoing)
Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science — University of Southern California (2024)
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer Engineering — University of Pune (2022)
My research centers on building multimodal foundation models with reasoning capabilities that integrate vision (image/video), language, and audio through cross-modal alignment and grounding via Reinforcement Learning (for eg., DPO and GRPO)
Courses
2025 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| CSE 485 | Computer Sci Capstone Proj I |
| CSE 485 | Computer Sci Capstone Proj I |