I'm a Master's student in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, I was a Computer Science undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, where I published research with multiple labs (ERIC Lab, Tech4Good Lab, and more).

My current interests revolve around generative and world modeling, embodied intelligence, AI safety, and controllable AI systems. I frequently work with other researchers (NVIDIA, Yale University, University of Michigan, UC Santa Barbara) and am always open to new ideas; please reach out if you are interested in collaborating!

In addition to research, I've done a lot of engineering work, including internships at Google and Amazon.

Research

* denotes equal contribution

SafePro: Evaluating the Safety of Professional-Level AI Agents

Kaiwen Zhou, Shreedhar Jangam*, Ashwin Nagarajan*, Tejas Polu*, Suhas Oruganti, Chengzhi Liu, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yuting Zheng, Sravana Jyothi Narayanaraju, Xin Eric Wang

ICLR Workshop on Agents in the Wild: Safety, Security, and Beyond, 2026

Bringing ‘On-the-Job’ Learning into Education: Lessons From a Micro-Role Apprenticeship Program and Implications for Platform Design

Audrey Ostrom, Jiayu Yuki Yin, Jose Manuel Chavez, Pragna Chennuri, Jialai Li, Ashwin Nagarajan, Psi Padhya, Yash Raj Singh, Sonia Salunke, Iris Tai, Chi-Kwan Jasmine Tai, David T Lee

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Poster), 2026

Designing Virtual Reality Games About Grief: Reflections from Psychology and Healthcare Professionals

Amina Kobenova, Thais Alvarenga, Piper Stickler, Ashwin Nagarajan, Sri Kurniawan

Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference, 2026

PhyWorldBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Physical Realism in Text-to-Video Models

Jing Gu, Xian Liu, Yu Zeng, Ashwin Nagarajan, Fangrui Zhu, Daniel Hong, Yue Fan, Qianqi Yan, Kaiwen Zhou, Ming-Yu Liu, Xin Eric Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026 Oral

The Name-Free Gap: Policy-Aware Stylistic Control in Music Generation

Ashwin Nagarajan, Hao-Wen Dong

NeurIPS Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Music: Where Creativity Meets Computation, 2025

CCC: Enhancing Video Generation via Structured MLLM Feedback

Jing Gu, Ashwin Nagarajan, Tejas Polu, Kaizhi Zheng, Ruijian Zha, Jie Yang, Xin Eric Wang

ICML Workshop on Test-Time Adaptation: Putting Updates to the Test, 2025

Self-Resource Allocation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Alfonso Amayuelas, Saaket Agashe, Jingbo Yang, Ashwin Nagarajan, Antonis Antoniades, Xin Eric Wang, William Yang Wang

ICML Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems in the Era of Foundation Models, 2025

Human-centered World Modeling: Enhancing Multi-Agent AI Adaptability with Chain-of-Thought and Symbolic Reasoning

Reza Habibi, Zhiyu Lin, Jiahong Li, Tejas Polu, Ashwin Nagarajan, Magy Seif El-Nasr

CHI Workshop on Human-AI Interaction for Augmented Reasoning, 2025 Oral