Shubham Kumar | Personal Website
Welcome to my website! I am a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Prof. Narendra Ahuja. I am funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and multiple UIUC fellowships.
My research interest centers on decision-making and planning for autonomous systems, focusing on dynamic, partially-observable environments. I just spent a summer at IBM, under the mentorship of Saurabh Jha, where I worked on world models for model-based control. Previously, I worked in AI interpertability & safety.
I obtained my B.S. from UCSD, where I did research with Prof. Truong Nguyen and Prof. Pamela Cosman.
Recent News
Oct 2026
Attended COLM 2026 in San Francisco! Read my reflection on the experience.
Sep 2026
See our pre-print on belief-based world models for LLM decision-making under partial observability. Accepted to the Continual World Models Workshop at NeurIPS 2026.
July 2026
Our paper, LOCA, has been accepted to COLM 2026! LOCA explains why jailbreak attacks succeed in LLMs.
June 2026
Attended CVPR 2026 in Denver! Read my reflection on the experience.
May 2026
Joined IBM as an extern for the summer.
Feb 2026
Our paper, SURF, was accepted to CVPR 2026!
Apr 2023
Recieved the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Mar 2023
Commited to UIUC for a MS/PhD program. Recieved the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship, ECE Distinguished Research Fellowship, and ECE Promise of Excellence Fellowship.
Research Highlights
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