Nikash Bhardwaj

Email | Scholar | LinkedIn | Github
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I am a student at CMU majoring in Computer Science and focusing on robotics and machine learning research. Outside of research, I enjoy playing soccer, tennis, pickleball, ping pong, skiing, and cooking and traveling.

Research
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Compositional Image Generation via Iterative Refinement


Shantanu Jaiswal, Mihir Prabhudesai, Nikash Bhardwaj, Zheyang Qin, Amir Zadeh, Chuan Li, Katerina Fragkiadaki, Deepak Pathak
In submission
arXiv / Website / Code (Soon)

A training-free iterative refinement mechanism to improve compositional image generation capabilities of text-to-image models (incl. NanoBanana, GPT-Image-1 and Qwen-Image).
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Solving Physics Olympiad via Reinforcement Learning on Physics Simulators


Aryan Satpathy*, Mihir Prabhudesai*, Yangmin Li**, Zheyang Qin**, Nikash Bhardwaj, Amir Zadeh, Chuan Li, Katerina Fragkiadaki, Deepak Pathak
In submission
Paper / Website

Converting physics simulators into cheap, scalable data generators to distill physical reasoning into LLMs.
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Recovering Walls and Cliffs from Monocular Images for Educational Robots


Nikash Bhardwaj, David Touretzky
CMU Meeting of the Minds, December, 2024
Poster

Performed computer vision research enabling low-cost educational robots to navigate using only onboard cameras and neural-network-based depth estimation, implementing edge detection, surface recovery, and world-map construction in Python so robots can recognize their surroundings and safely traverse unknown terrain.
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Optimal Investment Management


Nikash Bhardwaj, Kathy Yan, William Hrusa
CMU Meeting of the Minds, May, 2024
Poster

Developed optimization models to solve agency and optimal investment problems for hedge funds, using Python with an Excel-based interface to choose fee structures that maximize the expected utility of both managers and investors under multi-period commission and utility functions.

Design adapted from Jon Barron's website.