Dr. Ankur Narang

Research

Research

Each area combines a research question, the concepts involved, the papers, and the systems where the ideas were deployed.

Current research

Before the Needle: Semantic Action Contracts for Risk-Aware Robot Intervention

SemRob @ Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026

Active PerceptionPOMDPRobot SafetySemantic AffordancesConformal PredictionHuman DeferralClosed-Loop Simulation
  1. Perception uncertainty
  2. Semantic risk
  3. Active sensing
  4. Sense / Act / Defer
  5. Safe action authorization

Conceptual summary of the framework, not an experimental result.

Opponent Modeling with Meta-Learning for Competitive Environments

ICML Workshop on Multi-Task and Lifelong Reinforcement Learning

Meta-RLMAMLe-MAMLPPOMulti-Agent RLPartial ObservabilityOpponent Modeling
  1. Perception uncertainty
  2. Semantic risk
  3. Active sensing
  4. Sense / Act / Defer
  5. Safe action authorization

Conceptual summary of the framework, not an experimental result.

Themes

Research areas

Physical AI & Robot Safety

How should an embodied agent decide when to act, sense further, or defer to a human?

Active PerceptionPOMDPSemantic AffordancesConformal PredictionHuman Deferral

Reinforcement Learning

How do agents learn robust policies in competitive, non-stationary environments?

Deep RLMeta-RLOpponent ModelingBidding & Allocation

Multimodal AI

How do language, vision and interaction signals combine into usable representations?

Vision-LanguageAvatarsImage-to-3DRepresentation Learning

Recommendation & NLP

How do you serve relevant multilingual content at consumer internet scale?

Multilingual NLPRecommendationRankingLow-Resource Languages

Telecom & Predictive Systems

Can fraud and network anomalies be predicted early enough to act on?

Fraud DetectionAnomaly DetectionTime Series

HPC & Distributed Systems

How far can compilers, schedulers and distributed runtimes push large-scale computation?

Parallel AlgorithmsCompilersSchedulingDistributed Storage

Papers

Selected publications

All publications (16)