Manasi Sharma

Hi there! I'm a Research Engineer at Scale AI, where I work on evaluations, benchmarking, and reinforcement learning / post-training research to train frontier models with better reasoning capabilities for state-of-the-art agents like browser & computer-use agents. My work has been published at top-tier Machine Learning conference venues such as ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS. Previously, I was a Research Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Group (Group 1) at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where I focused on explainability & trustworthiness research and developing robust evaluation tools for high-stakes applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). Before that, I earned my Master's in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence track) from Stanford University and my undergraduate degree from Columbia University, where I majored in Computer Science and Physics. I consider myself a generalist, passionate about applying AI to a diverse range of real-world challenges, from astronomy to autonomous vehicles to now agents.

I am fortunate to have worked with many different professors over the course of my academic career. I conducted research in the ILIAD Lab under Prof. Dorsa Sadigh at Stanford, in which I worked on robotic learning using language-conditioned diffusion models, and the Stanford Vision Lab under Prof. Fei-Fei Li and Prof. Jiajun Wu, in which I worked on assembling action, goal, etc. labels for demonstrations for the BEHAVIOR project in robotic simulation benchmarking. As an undergrad, I was supervised by Prof. Daniel Hsu and Prof. Zoltan Haiman on interpreting astrophysical deep learning models for weak lensing using an array of saliency map methods. Before that, in 2019, I first developed my passion for AI at Caltech under Prof. Mansi Kasliwal, creating a real/bogus image classifier for the IR-Gattini telescope, which was later integrated into its data processing pipeline.

My research interests include AI evaluation methodologies, agents, reinforcement learning, and AI safety and alignment.

Everything else: Outside of work, I love dancing (I was Captain of the Columbia Raas dance team), playing the keyboard and exploring the natural landscapes in the Bay Area!