I am an Assistant Professor at New York University in the Courant Institute (Computer Science) and the Center for Data Science.
I enjoy thinking about the interplay between language (structure more than form), reasoning and sequential decision making. My research goal is to understand systems that exhibit broadly intelligent behaviors (AI systems and biological organisms) and build better AI systems!
Recently, I have worked on:
1. Developing algorithms to understand the structure of solutions artificial neural networks implement and how it affects generalization [I,II],
2. Understanding the complexity and structure of naturally arising animal communication systems in the wild 🐳 [III, IV],
3. How language and natural-language-like structures can support effective reasoning and planning in embodied agents and robots 🤖 [V,VI, VII].
I was previously a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research (2025-2026). I did my PhD (2025) in EECS at MIT advised by Prof. Antonio Torralba and Prof. Jacob Andreas. Before that, I was at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute for a year-long research internship advised by Prof. Abhinav Gupta. Even before that, I was an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. During my PhD, I have also spent some fun summers at Microsoft Research NYC and NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab.
Recent News
- 07/2025 Invited talk at the ICML Workshop on Machine Learning for Audio.
- 11/2024 Research was featured in the National Geographic Magazine.
- 11/2024 Invited talk at the Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals.
- 11/2024 Invited talk at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
- 10/2024 Invited talk at TED AI in San Francisco.
- 09/2024 Excited to be part of the cohorts of Rising Stars in EECS, Rising Stars in Data Science, and Rising Stars in Generative AI!
- 06/2024 Invited talk at Google Deepmind LLM Reasoning Seminar.
- 06/2024 Invited talk at Microsoft Research New England.
- 06/2024 Invited talk at Imagination in Action at CSAIL, MIT.
- 06/2024 Invited talk at The Last Whaling Station, Iceland on World Oceans Day.
- 05/2024 Check out a discussion and perspective on Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations with Carl Zimmer at The Daily Podcast and in The New York Times!
- 05/2024 Our paper on Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations was accepted at Nature Communications!
- 10/2023 Invited talk at New Horizons in Generative AI workshop at Stanford.
- 07/2023 Invited talk and panelist at the Workshop on Learning for Task and Motion Planning at Robotics Science and Systems.
- 06/2023 Invited talk at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley.
Representative Publications
Michael Y Hu, Apurva Gandhi, Kyunghyun Cho, Tal Linzen, Pratyusha Sharma
arXiv, 2026
paper
Reece Shuttleworth, Jacob Andreas, Antonio Torralba, Pratyusha Sharma
NeurIPS, 2025
paper
Pratyusha Sharma, Shane Gero, Roger Payne, David F. Gruber, Daniela Rus*, Antonio Torralba*, Jacob Andreas*
Nature Communications, 2024 (Top 25 Life and Biological Sciences Articles of 2024)
paper
The New York Times
National Geographic
The Daily Podcast
Washington Post
Science Magazine
MIT News
BBC
TechCrunch
AP News
Reuters
NPR
Publications
Corby Rosset, Pratyusha Sharma, Andrew Zhao, Miguel Gonzalez-Fernandez, Ahmed Awadallah
COLM, 2026
paper
Aluma et. al. (alphabetical)
Scientific Reports, 2026
paper
Jayden Teoh, Manan Tomar, Kwangjun Ahn, Edward S Hu, Tim Pearce, Pratyusha Sharma, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Riashat Islam, Alex Lamb, John Langford
arXiv, 2026
paper
Jiwan Chung, Neel Joshi, Pratyusha Sharma, Youngjae Yu, Vibhav Vineet
arXiv, 2026
paper
Kwangjun Ahn, Byron Xu, Natalie Abreu, Ying Fan, Gagik Magakyan, Pratyusha Sharma, Zheng Zhan, John Langford
arXiv, 2025
paper
Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan, Pratyusha Sharma, Antonio Torralba, Sara Beery
ICLR, 2026
paper
Pratyusha Sharma, Shane Gero, Daniela Rus*, Antonio Torralba*, Jacob Andreas*
bioRxiv, 2024
paper
Shiva Sreeram, Alaa Maalouf, Pratyusha Sharma, Daniela Rus
NeurIPS, 2025 (Spotlight)
paper coming soon
Haotian Fu, Pratyusha Sharma, Elias Stengel-Eskin, George Konidaris, Nicolas Le Roux, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan
ICML 2024
paper
Lio Wong*, Jiayuan Mao*, Pratyusha Sharma*, Zachary S. Siegel, Jiahai Feng, Noa Korneev, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Jacob Andreas.
ICLR 2024
paper
MIT News
Pratyusha Sharma*, Tamar Rott Shaham*, Manel Baradad, Stephanie Fu, Adrian RodriguezMunoz, Shivam Duggal, Phillip Isola, Antonio Torralba.
CVPR 2024 (Highlight)
paper
MIT News
Shikhar Murty, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas, Christopher Manning
EMNLP 2023
paper
Shikhar Murty*, Orr Paradise*, Pratyusha Sharma*
EMNLP Findings 2023
paper
Shikhar Murty, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas, Christopher Manning
ACL 2023
paper
Shikhar Murty, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas, Christopher Manning
ICLR 2023
paper
Pratyusha Sharma, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Valts Blukis, Chris Paxton, Tucker Hermans, Antonio Torralba, Jacob Andreas, Dieter Fox
RSS 2022
paper
Pratyusha Sharma, Antonio Torralba, Jacob Andreas
ACL 2022
paper
Jacob Andreas, Gašper Beguš, Michael M Bronstein, Roee Diamant, Denley Delaney, Shane Gero, Shafi Goldwasser, David F Gruber, Sarah de Haas, Peter Malkin, Nikolay Pavlov, Roger Payne,
Giovanni Petri, Daniela Rus, Pratyusha Sharma, Dan Tchernov, Pernille Tønnesen, Antonio Torralba, Daniel Vogt, Robert J Wood
(Authors in alphabetical order)
iScience 2022
paper
The New Yorker
Yiyue Luo, Yunzhu Li, Pratyusha Sharma, Wan Shou, Kui Wu, Michael Foshey, Beichen Li, Tomas Palacios, Antonio Torralba, Wojciech Matusik
Nature Electronics 2021
paper
Pratyusha Sharma, Deepak Pathak, Abhinav Gupta
NeurIPS 2019
paper
Pratyusha Sharma*, Lekha Mohan*, Lerrel Pinto, Abhinav Gupta
CoRL 2018
paper