Kancheti Sai Srinivas

Kancheti Sai Srinivas Ph.D. Student (PMRF Scholar) Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad Contact: Email, (+91) 9003107318, Google Scholar, LinkedIn

About

I am a final year Ph.D. student at IIT Hyderabad, advised by Prof. Vineeth N Balasubramanian. My research focuses on trustworthy machine learning and on multimodality, with recent work on enhancing visual reasoning in Multimodal Language Models. You can find my CV here.

Research Interests

• Visual reasoning in Multimodal LLMs (spatial reasoning, grounding, RLVR/RL post-training)

• Human-in-the-loop / preference-aware learning (algorithmic recourse)

• Robustness, interpretability, and reliability of ML systems

News

• [Feb 2026] Attenting ACM ARCS 2026 at IIT Hyderabad

• [Jul 2025] Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research India, Bangalore.

• [2024] Awarded the Microsoft India Research PhD Award.

• [Jan 2024] Presented “Interpretable Model Drift Detection” at CODS-COMAD 2024.

• [2021] Awarded the Prime Minister's Research Fellowship (PMRF), December 2020 cycle.

Publications

Here is my Google Scholar

• [2025] Efficient Vocabulary-Free Fine-Grained Visual Recognition in the Age of Multimodal LLMs – Hari Chandana K., K. Sai Srinivas, Gowtham Reddy A., Vineeth N. Balasubramanian. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025. OpenReview

• [2025] HARE: Human-in-the-Loop Algorithmic Recourse – K. Sai Srinivas*, Rahul Vigneswaran*, Bamdev Mishra, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025. OpenReview

• [2025] Semantic Alignment for Prompt-Tuning in Vision Language Models – K. Sai Srinivas*, Hari Chandana K*, Gowtham Reddy A., Vineeth N. Balasubramanian. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025. OpenReview

• [2025] Conformal Prediction in the Age of Multimodal Foundation Models: A Survey – K. Sai Srinivas*, Christian Stavan*, Kunal Tilaganji*, Sai Mathura Krishnan*, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian. Book chapter submission (2025).

• [2024] Interpretable Model Drift Detection – Pranoy Panda, K. Sai Srinivas, V. Balasubramanian, Gaurav Sinha, CODS-COMAD ’24 link

• [2022] Matching Learned Causal Effects of Neural Networks with Domain Priors – K. Sai Srinivas*, A. Gowtham Reddy*, V. Balasubramanian, Amit Sharma, ICML’22 link

Preprints / Under Review

• [2025] Visual Spatial Reasoning through RL: Successes, Failures, and Lessons – K. Sai Srinivas*, Aditya S. Kanade*, Rohit Sinha, Tanuja Ganu, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian. (under review) link

• [2025] Do SOTA Multimodal Reasoning Models Exhibit Generalized Spatial Intelligence? – K. Sai Srinivas*, Aditya S. Kanade*, Tanuja Ganu, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian. (under review)

Education

• PhD, Department of CSE, IIT Hyderabad, Jan 2021 - Present (PMRF Scholar; GPA: 9.47)

• Dual-Degree (BTech & MTech), Department of CSE, IIT Madras, Jul 2013 - Jul 2019 (Minor: Operations Research; GPA: 8.91)

Awards & Service

• Microsoft India Research PhD Award (2024).

• Prime Minister's Research Fellowship (PMRF) (2021).

• Reviewer: TMLR; CVPR 2025 (top reviewer); AISTATS 2025; AAAI 20242025; NeurIPS 2024; ECCV 2024; subreviewer for ICML 20232024, IJCAI 2023, ICLR 2022/2023, AISTATS 2022.

• Teaching Assistant: Deep Learning for Vision (Fall 2019, Spring 2021); Deep Learning (Spring 2022); Foundations of Machine Learning (Fall 2022); Advanced Topics in Machine Learning (Spring 2024).