Research Intern · Microsoft Research India

Abhay Bhandarkar

I'm a final-year undergraduate researcher bridging perception and generation — working across computer vision, multimodal AI and applied ML, with a focus on visual reasoning, representation learning and generative modeling for content creation.

I'm a Research Intern at Microsoft Research India, advised by Dr. Vineeth N Balasubramanian, and a Computer Science undergraduate at Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore. I'm actively seeking PhD opportunities in ML and Computer Vision.

Computer Vision Multimodal AI Generative Modeling Visual Reasoning Representation Learning
Abhay Bhandarkar
Recent

News & Highlights

2026 Recognized as one of the EvoStar Outstanding Students of 2026.
2026 Pixels to Layers accepted as an Oral at the AI4CC Workshop, CVPR 2026 — and to the CVPR 2026 Demos track.
Jan 2026 Joined Microsoft Research India as a Research Intern, advised by Dr. Vineeth N Balasubramanian.
2026 CAMMEL-ViT Net accepted as an Oral at MIUA 2026; VOUCH accepted at the AI4Math Workshop, ICML 2026.
2026 Journal papers out: PI-TFN (Eng. Science & Technology, Q1) and The Anatomy of a Resilient Phishing Detector (Frontiers in Computer Science, Q2).
2025 Awarded a $50,000 IBM compute grant; 1st place (solo) at the CNS Hackathon with the MITRA AI-safety framework.
Research

Selected Publications

A few highlighted papers. See the full list — with course projects and preprints — on the Publications page.

Recognition

Awards & Achievements

2026 Recognized as one of the EvoStar Outstanding Students of 2026.
2025 Selected as an ACM Summer Uplink Intern — 16 chosen from 600+ applicants across India.
2024/25 Received $50,000 from IBM in compute resources for research in space sustainability.
2024 1st place, CNS Hackathon (solo) with the MITRA AI-safety framework; 2nd prize, ACM Hackathon for CAMMEL-ViT Net.
2024 2nd place, Whackiest'24 among 800+ participants (CodeRIT); regional qualifier, Solving For India (GFG × Google Cloud).
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सुखार्थिनः कुतो विद्या, नास्ति विद्यार्थिनः सुखम्।
सुखार्थी वा त्यजेद्विद्यां, विद्यार्थी वा त्यजेत्सुखम्॥

"The seeker of comfort has no knowledge, and the seeker of knowledge has no comfort. One who desires comfort must abandon knowledge; one who desires knowledge must abandon comfort."