Akanksha Saran

Akanksha is a Research Scientist in the Multimodal Content Experiences Lab at Adobe Research. Her work spans modeling human behavior across multimodal interfaces and designing human-interactive machine-learning algorithms for sequential decision-making. Recently, her work has focused on reinforcement learning theory and practice: model-based RL, world models, latent state discovery, and developing algorithms with provable guarantees for policy learning. A core goal of her research is to lower real-world access barriers so end-users can benefit from robust, sample-efficient interactive systems.

Prior to joining Adobe Research, Akanksha has spent time in research groups at Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft Research, and Sony. She graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin and an MS in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. She was the President’s Gold Medalist for her undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Jodhpur in India and was named as an EECS Rising Star in 2023.