abhshkdz at gmail dot com

News


Bio

Previously, I was a Research Scientist at Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) at Meta working on deep neural networks and its applications in climate change, specifically focusing on electrocatalyst discovery for renewable energy storage as part of the Open Catalyst Project.

Before that, I was a Computer Science PhD student at Georgia Tech, advised by Dhruv Batra, and working closely with Devi Parikh, where I focused on developing artificial agents that can see (computer vision), talk (language modeling), and act (reinforcement learning).

IIT Roorkee
2011 - 2015
Queensland Brain Institute
Summer 2015
Virginia Tech
2015 - 2016
Georgia Tech
2017 - 2020
Facebook AI Research
S2017, W2018, S2018
DeepMind
Winter 2019
Tesla Autopilot
Summer 2019
Facebook AI Research
2020-2024

During my PhD, I interned thrice at Facebook AI Research — Summer 2017 and Spring 2018 at Menlo Park, working with Georgia Gkioxari, Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra on training embodied agents for navigation and question-answering in simulated environments (see embodiedqa.org), and Summer 2018 at Montréal, working with Mike Rabbat and Joelle Pineau on communication protocols in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In 2019, I interned at DeepMind in London working on grounded language learning with Felix Hill, Laura Rimell, and Stephen Clark, and at Tesla Autopilot in Palo Alto working on differentiable neural architecture search with Andrej Karpathy.

My PhD research was supported by fellowships from Facebook, Adobe, and Snap.

Prior to joining grad school, I worked on neural coding in zebrafish tectum as an intern under Prof. Geoffrey Goodhill and Lilach Avitan at the Goodhill Lab, Queensland Brain Institute.

I got my Bachelor’s at IIT Roorkee in 2015. During my undergrad, I took part in Google Summer of Code (2013 and 2014), won several competitions (Yahoo! HackU!, Microsoft Code.Fun.Do., Deloitte CCTC 2013 and 2014), and owe most of my programming/tinkering bent to SDSLabs.

On the side, I built aideadlin.es (countdowns to a bunch of CV/NLP/ML/AI conference deadlines) and aipaygrad.es (statistics of industry job offers in AI), neural-vqa and its extension neural-vqa-attention, HackFlowy, graf, Erdős, etc. I also occasionally dabble in generative art. I like this map tracking the places I’ve been to. Blog posts from a previous life.


Publications

Generalizing Denoising to Non-Equilibrium Structures Improves Equivariant Force Fields

Yi-Lun Liao, Tess Smidt, Abhishek Das
Paper


The Open DAC 2023 Dataset and Challenges for Sorbent Discovery in Direct Air Capture

Anuroop Sriram, Sihoon Choi, Xiaohan Yu, Logan M. Brabson, Abhishek Das, Zachary Ulissi, Matt Uyttendaele, Andrew J. Medford, David S. Sholl
Paper Code Website


EquiformerV2: Improved Equivariant Transformer for Scaling to Higher-Degree Representations

Yi-Lun Liao, Brandon Wood, Abhishek Das*, Tess Smidt*
ICLR 2024 Paper Code


AdsorbML: Accelerating Adsorption Energy Calculations with Machine Learning

Janice Lan*, Aini Palizhati*, Muhammed Shuaibi*, Brandon M. Wood*, Brook Wander, Abhishek Das, Matt Uyttendaele, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Zachary W. Ulissi
npj Computational Materials Paper Code


PIRLNav: Pretraining with Imitation and RL Finetuning for ObjectNav

Ram Ramrakhya, Dhruv Batra, Erik Wijmans, Abhishek Das
CVPR 2023, RRL workshop at ICLR 2023 Paper Code Website


The Open Catalyst 2022 (OC22) Dataset and Challenges for Oxide Electrocatalysis

Richard Tran*, Janice Lan*, Muhammed Shuaibi*, Siddharth Goyal*, Brandon M. Wood*, Abhishek Das, Javier Heras-Domingo, Adeesh Kolluru, Ammar Rizvi, Nima Shoghi, Anuroop Sriram, Zachary Ulissi, C. Lawrence Zitnick
ACS Catalysis 2022
Paper Code Dataset


GemNet-OC: Developing Graph Neural Networks for Large and Diverse Molecular Simulation Datasets

Johannes Gasteiger, Muhammed Shuaibi, Anuroop Sriram, Stephan Günnemann, Zachary Ulissi, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Abhishek Das
TMLR 2022 Paper Code


Spherical Channels for Modeling Atomic Interactions

C. Lawrence Zitnick, Abhishek Das, Adeesh Kolluru, Janice Lan, Muhammed Shuaibi, Anuroop Sriram, Zachary Ulissi, Brandon Wood
NeurIPS 2022 Paper Code


Open Challenges in Developing Generalizable Large Scale Machine Learning Models for Catalyst Discovery

Adeesh Kolluru*, Muhammed Shuaibi*, Aini Palizhati, Nima Shoghi, Abhishek Das, Brandon Wood, C. Lawrence Zitnick, John R. Kitchin, Zachary Ulissi
ACS Catalysis (Perspective) 2022 Paper


Transfer learning using attentions across atomic systems with graph neural networks (TAAG)

Adeesh Kolluru, Nima Shoghi, Muhammed Shuaibi, Siddharth Goyal, Abhishek Das, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Zachary Ulissi
The Journal of Chemical Physics 2022 Paper Code


Habitat-Web: Learning Embodied Object-Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations at Scale

Ram Ramrakhya, Eric Undersander, Dhruv Batra, Abhishek Das
CVPR 2022 Paper Code Website Presentation video


Towards Training Billion Parameter Graph Neural Networks for Atomic Simulations

Anuroop Sriram, Abhishek Das, Brandon M. Wood, Siddharth Goyal, C. Lawrence Zitnick
ICLR 2022 Paper Code


Rotation Invariant Graph Neural Networks using Spin Convolutions

Muhammed Shuaibi, Adeesh Kolluru, Abhishek Das, Aditya Grover, Anuroop Sriram, Zachary Ulissi, C. Lawrence Zitnick
Paper Code


Automated Video Description for Blind and Low Vision Users

Aditya Bodi, Pooyan Fazli, Shasta Ihorn, Yue-Ting Siu, Andrew T Scott, Lothar Narins, Yash Kant, Abhishek Das, Ilmi Yoon
CHI EA 2021
Paper


Auxiliary Tasks and Exploration Enable ObjectNav

Joel Ye, Dhruv Batra, Abhishek Das, Erik Wijmans
ICCV 2021
Paper Code Website


ForceNet: A Graph Neural Network for Large-Scale Quantum Calculations

Weihua Hu, Muhammed Shuaibi, Abhishek Das, Siddharth Goyal, Anuroop Sriram, Jure Leskovec, Devi Parikh, C. Lawrence Zitnick
ICLR 2021 Deep Learning for Simulation Workshop
Paper opencatalystproject.org Presentation video


The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges

Lowik Chanussot*, Abhishek Das*, Siddharth Goyal*, Thibaut Lavril*, Muhammed Shuaibi*, Morgane Riviére, Kevin Tran, Javier Heras-Domingo, Caleb Ho, Weihua Hu, Aini Palizhati, Anuroop Sriram, Brandon Wood, Junwoong Yoon, Devi Parikh, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Zachary Ulissi
ACS Catalysis 2021
Paper Code Dataset opencatalystproject.org


An Introduction to Electrocatalyst Design using Machine Learning for Renewable Energy Storage

C. Lawrence Zitnick, Lowik Chanussot, Abhishek Das, Siddharth Goyal, Javier Heras-Domingo, Caleb Ho, Weihua Hu, Thibaut Lavril, Aini Palizhati, Morgane Riviére, Muhammed Shuaibi, Anuroop Sriram, Kevin Tran, Brandon Wood, Junwoong Yoon, Devi Parikh, Zachary Ulissi
Paper opencatalystproject.org


Auxiliary Tasks Speed Up Learning PointGoal Navigation

Joel Ye, Dhruv Batra, Erik Wijmans*, Abhishek Das*
CoRL 2020
Paper Code


Large-scale Pretraining for Visual Dialog: A Simple State-of-the-Art Baseline

Vishvak Murahari, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Abhishek Das
ECCV 2020
Paper Code


Building agents that can see, talk, and act

Abhishek Das
PhD Thesis AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award, Runner-up
Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Best PhD Thesis Award
Georgia Tech College of Computing Dissertation Award


Probing Emergent Semantics in Predictive Agents via Question Answering

Abhishek Das*, Federico Carnevale*, Hamza Merzic, Laura Rimell, Rosalia Schneider, Josh Abramson, Alden Hung, Arun Ahuja, Stephen Clark, Gregory Wayne, Felix Hill
ICML 2020
Paper Presentation video Slides


Feel The Music: Automatically Generating A Dance For An Input Song

Purva Tendulkar, Abhishek Das, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Devi Parikh
ICCC 2020
Paper Code Videos


IR-VIC: Unsupervised Discovery of Sub-goals for Transfer in RL

Nirbhay Modhe, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Mohit Sharma, Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Ramakrishna Vedantam
IJCAI-PRICAI 2020, ICLR 2019 Task-Agnostic RL Workshop
Paper


Improving Generative Visual Dialog by Answering Diverse Questions

Vishvak Murahari, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Abhishek Das
EMNLP 2019
Paper Code


TarMAC: Targeted Multi-Agent Communication

Abhishek Das, Théophile Gervet, Joshua Romoff, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Michael Rabbat, Joelle Pineau
ICML 2019
Paper Slides




Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Clouds

Erik Wijmans*, Samyak Datta*, Oleksandr Maksymets*, Abhishek Das, Georgia Gkioxari, Stefan Lee, Irfan Essa, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra
CVPR 2019 (Oral)
Paper


Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog

Huda Alamri, Vincent Cartillier, Abhishek Das, Jue Wang, Stefan Lee, Peter Anderson, Irfan Essa, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Anoop Cherian, Tim K. Marks, Chiori Hori
CVPR 2019
Paper Code video-dialog.com


End-to-end Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog Using Multimodal Attention-based Video Features

Chiori Hori, Huda Alamri, Jue Wang, Gordon Wichern, Takaaki Hori, Anoop Cherian, Tim K. Marks, Vincent Cartillier, Raphael Lopes, Abhishek Das, Irfan Essa, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh
ICASSP 2019
Paper video-dialog.com


Neural Modular Control for Embodied Question Answering

Abhishek Das, Georgia Gkioxari, Stefan Lee, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra
CoRL 2018 (Spotlight)
Paper embodiedqa.org Presentation video Slides


Embodied Question Answering

Abhishek Das, Samyak Datta, Georgia Gkioxari, Stefan Lee, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra
CVPR 2018 (Oral)
Paper embodiedqa.org Code Presentation video Slides


Evaluating Visual Conversational Agents via Cooperative Human-AI Games

Prithvijit Chattopadhyay*, Deshraj Yadav*, Viraj Prabhu, Arjun Chandrasekaran, Abhishek Das, Stefan Lee, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh
HCOMP 2017
Paper Code


Learning Cooperative Visual Dialog Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abhishek Das*, Satwik Kottur*, Stefan Lee, José M.F. Moura, Dhruv Batra
ICCV 2017 (Oral)
Paper Code Presentation video Slides


Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization

Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Michael Cogswell, Abhishek Das, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra
IJCV 2019, ICCV 2017, NIPS 2016 Interpretable ML for Complex Systems Workshop
Paper Code Demo


Visual Dialog

Abhishek Das, Satwik Kottur, Khushi Gupta, Avi Singh, Deshraj Yadav, José M.F. Moura, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra
PAMI 2018, CVPR 2017 (Spotlight)
Paper Code visualdialog.org AMT chat interface Demo Presentation video Slides


Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?

Abhishek Das*, Harsh Agrawal*, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra
CVIU 2017, EMNLP 2016, ICML 2016 Workshop on Visualization for Deep Learning
Paper Project+Dataset neural-vqa-attention


Talks


Side projects

aipaygrad.es

aipaygrad.es provides statistics of industry job offers in Artificial Intelligence (AI). All data is anonymous, cross-verified against offer letters and will hopefully reduce information asymmetry.

aideadlin.es

aideadlin.es is a webpage to keep track of CV/NLP/ML/AI conference deadlines. It's hosted on GitHub, and countdowns are automatically updated via pull requests to the data file in the repo.

neural-vqa-attention

Torch implementation of an attention-based visual question answering model (Yang et al., CVPR16). The model looks at an image, reads a question, and comes up with an answer to the question and a heatmap of where it looked in the image to answer it. Some results here.

neural-vqa

neural-vqa is an efficient, GPU-based Torch implementation of the visual question answering model from the NIPS 2015 paper 'Exploring Models and Data for Image Question Answering' by Ren et al.

Erdős

Erdős by SDSLabs is a competitive math learning platform, similar in spirit to Project Euler, albeit more feature-packed (support for holding competitions, has a social layer) and prettier.

graf

graf plots pretty git contribution bar graphs in the terminal. gem install graf to install.

HackFlowy

Clone of WorkFlowy.com, a beautiful, list-based note-taking website that has a 500-item monthly limit on the free tier :-(. This project is an open-source clone of WorkFlowy. "Make lists. Not war." :-)

AirMaps

AirMaps was a fun hackathon project that lets users navigate through Google Earth with gestures and speech commands using a Kinect sensor. It was the winning entry in Microsoft Code.Fun.Do.

HackView

Another fun hackathon-winning project built during Yahoo! HackU! 2012 that involves webRTC-based P2P video chat, and was faster than any other video chat provider (at the time, before Google launched Hangouts).

8tracks-downloader

Ugly-looking, but super-effective bash script for downloading entire playlists from 8tracks. (Still works as of 10/2016).