Dwip Dalal

Hi, I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign, advised by Svetlana Lazebnik. I also closely collaborate with Unnat Jain and Heng Ji. I am working on post-training methods to build models for robotics that generalize. Some keywords to easily convey my research: MoT, VLAs, WAMs, VLMs, and multi‑modal representation learning.

Previously, I completed my B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, where I was awarded the Institute Gold medal for graduating at the top of my discipline.

I had great summers at Amazon (Ring AI, 2026) and Microsoft Research (2025), where I worked on long-video understanding with MLLMs and on vision language navigation with MLLM agents, respectively. Check out the projects: Repairable Uncertainty (Amazon) and AgentNav (Microsoft Research).

Internships

Amazon
Summer 2026

Microsoft Research
Summer & Fall 2025

University of British Columbia
Summer 2023

USC (AIISC)
2022‑2024

ISRO
Spring 2023

TCS Research
Winter & Spring 2023

EFICENS
Summer 2022

News

Jun 2026: 🎉🎉 Awarded the Dan Vivoli Endowed Fellowship by the ECE department at UIUC for the 2026–2027 academic year.
Jun 2026: 🎉🎉 Selected for Y Combinator's AI Startup School 2026.
May 2026: 🤘🤘 Summer internship at Amazon Ring AI (Sunnyvale), focusing on MLLM and video understanding.
Apr 2026: 🎉🎉 Passed my PhD Qualifying Exam — now a PhD Candidate! (Committee: Alexander Schwing, Huan Zhang, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson)
Apr 2026: 🎉🎉 Awarded the Qualcomm Graduate Award for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Apr 2026: 🎉🎉 Awarded a scholarship from Modal to support my research on VLAs.
Feb 2026: 🎉🎉 Our work on self-correcting MLLMs with attention-guided image warping was accepted for oral presentation at CSLSC 2026 (UIUC).
Jan 2026: 🎉🎉 First author paper accepted at ICLR 2026.
Jan 2026: 🎉🎉 Two first author papers accepted at EACL 2026, with one selected for oral presentation.
May 2025: 🤘🤘 Summer internship at Microsoft Research (Redmond), focusing on MLLM agents and reasoning.
Aug 2024: 🎉🎉 Awarded the Dilip and Sandhya Sarwate Graduate Fellowship at UIUC for the 2024‑2025 academic year.
Jun 2024: 🎉🎉 Awarded the Institute Gold Medal at IIT Gandhinagar for highest CGPA.
Feb 2024: 🤘🤘 Nominated by IIT Gandhinagar for the Pre‑Doctoral Research Assistant Program at Microsoft Research India.
2023: 🎉🎉 Perfect 10/10 GPA for two consecutive semesters (6th & 7th).
Sep 2023: 🤘🤘 1st of 200 in SmartSense ML hackathon; job offer as ML Engineer II.

Publications

	Generalizable VLA Finetuning via Representation Anchoring and Language-Action Alignment Dwip Dalal, Shivansh Patel, Chahit Jain, Jeonghwan Kim, Utkarsh Mishra, Alex Baratian, Hyeonjeong Ha, Heng Ji, Svetlana Lazebnik, Unnat Jain *Under Review* Paper \| Code \| Project Page
Coming soon!	Repairable Uncertainty: Selective Temporal Reacquisition for Long-Video Understanding with MLLMs Dwip Dalal, Keval Doshi, Amar Kumar, Wei Wang, Sowndarya Sundar, Noranart Vesdapunt, Jim Thomas, Kah Kuen Fu, Svetlana Lazebnik *Under Review*
	Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Guided Image Warping Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Utkarsh Mishra, Jeonghwan Kim, Madhav Kanda, Hyeonjeong Ha, Svetlana Lazebnik, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain ICLR 2026 Paper \| Code \| Project Page
	Can MLLMs Find Their Way in a City? Exploring Emergent Navigation from Web-Scale Knowledge *Dwip Dalal,** Utkarsh Mishra, Narendra Ahuja, Nebojsa Jojic EACL 2026* (Oral) Paper \| arXiv \| Code \| Project Page
	Compositional Reasoning via Joint Image and Language Decomposition *Dwip Dalal,** Madhav Kanda, Zhenhailong Wang, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain EACL 2026* Paper \| Project Page
	Learning Robust Deep Visual Representations from EEG Brain Recordings Prajwal Singh, Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Shanmuganathan Raman, Krishna Prasad Miyapuram WACV 2024 Paper \| Code \| Project Page \| WACV Daily \| Best of WACV 2024
	Single Image LDR to HDR Conversion Using Conditional Diffusion Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Prajwal Singh, Shanmuganathan Raman International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'23) (Oral) Paper \| Project Page
	CreativityBench: Evaluating Agent Creative Reasoning via Affordance-Based Tool Repurposing Cheng Qian, Hyeonjeong Ha, Jiayu Liu, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Bingxuan Li, Aditi Tiwari, Dwip Dalal, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiusi Chen, Mahdi Namazifar, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji COLM 2026 Paper \| Code \| Project Page
	FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering Anku Rani, SM Tonmoy, Dwip Dalal, Shreya Gautam, Megha C., Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das ACL 2023 Paper \| Code & Dataset
	FACTIFY3M: A Benchmark for Multimodal Fact Verification with Explainability through 5W Question-Answering M Chakraborty, K Pahwa, A Rani, S Chatterjee, Dwip Dalal, H Dave, ... A Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das EMNLP 2023 Paper \| Project Page

Technical Reports

	A Dataset-Centric Survey of LLM-Agents for Data Science Dwip Dalal, Chuxuan Hu, Xiaona Zhou Arxiv, 2025 Paper
	Flow Symmetrization for Parameterized Constrained Diffeomorphisms *Dwip Dalal,** Aalok Gangopadhyay, Progyan Das, Shanmuganathan Raman Arxiv, 2024 Paper \| Code \| Project Page

Workshop Papers

	ODESolvers are also Wayfinders: Neural ODEs for Multi-Agent Pathplanning *Dwip Dalal,** Progyan Das, Anirban Dasgupta NeurIPS 2023 Workshop - Deep Learning and Differential Equations III* Paper \| Code
	MMT: A Multilingual and Multi-Topic Indian Social Media Dataset Dwip Dalal, Vivek Srivastava, Mayank Singh EACL 2023 workshop - Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP Paper \| Code & Dataset
	SEPSIS: I can catch your lies - A new paradigm for Deception Detection Anku Rani, Dwip Dalal, Shreya Gautam, Pankaj Gupta, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das ACL SRW 2025 Paper \| Code & Dataset

Template Credits: Jon and Saurabh

	Generalizable VLA Finetuning via Representation Anchoring and Language-Action Alignment Dwip Dalal, Shivansh Patel, Chahit Jain, Jeonghwan Kim, Utkarsh Mishra, Alex Baratian, Hyeonjeong Ha, Heng Ji, Svetlana Lazebnik, Unnat Jain *Under Review* Paper \| Code \| Project Page
Coming soon!	Repairable Uncertainty: Selective Temporal Reacquisition for Long-Video Understanding with MLLMs Dwip Dalal, Keval Doshi, Amar Kumar, Wei Wang, Sowndarya Sundar, Noranart Vesdapunt, Jim Thomas, Kah Kuen Fu, Svetlana Lazebnik *Under Review*
	Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Guided Image Warping Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Utkarsh Mishra, Jeonghwan Kim, Madhav Kanda, Hyeonjeong Ha, Svetlana Lazebnik, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain ICLR 2026 Paper \| Code \| Project Page
	Can MLLMs Find Their Way in a City? Exploring Emergent Navigation from Web-Scale Knowledge *Dwip Dalal,** Utkarsh Mishra, Narendra Ahuja, Nebojsa Jojic EACL 2026* (Oral) Paper \| arXiv \| Code \| Project Page
	Compositional Reasoning via Joint Image and Language Decomposition *Dwip Dalal,** Madhav Kanda, Zhenhailong Wang, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain EACL 2026* Paper \| Project Page
	Learning Robust Deep Visual Representations from EEG Brain Recordings Prajwal Singh, Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Shanmuganathan Raman, Krishna Prasad Miyapuram WACV 2024 Paper \| Code \| Project Page \| WACV Daily \| Best of WACV 2024
	Single Image LDR to HDR Conversion Using Conditional Diffusion Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Prajwal Singh, Shanmuganathan Raman International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'23) (Oral) Paper \| Project Page
	CreativityBench: Evaluating Agent Creative Reasoning via Affordance-Based Tool Repurposing Cheng Qian, Hyeonjeong Ha, Jiayu Liu, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Bingxuan Li, Aditi Tiwari, Dwip Dalal, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiusi Chen, Mahdi Namazifar, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji COLM 2026 Paper \| Code \| Project Page
	FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering Anku Rani, SM Tonmoy, Dwip Dalal, Shreya Gautam, Megha C., Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das ACL 2023 Paper \| Code & Dataset
	FACTIFY3M: A Benchmark for Multimodal Fact Verification with Explainability through 5W Question-Answering M Chakraborty, K Pahwa, A Rani, S Chatterjee, Dwip Dalal, H Dave, ... A Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das EMNLP 2023 Paper \| Project Page

Dwip Dalal

Internships

News

Publications

Generalizable VLA Finetuning via Representation Anchoring and Language-Action Alignment

Repairable Uncertainty: Selective Temporal Reacquisition for Long-Video Understanding with MLLMs

Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Guided Image Warping

Can MLLMs Find Their Way in a City? Exploring Emergent Navigation from Web-Scale Knowledge

Compositional Reasoning via Joint Image and Language Decomposition

Learning Robust Deep Visual Representations from EEG Brain Recordings

Single Image LDR to HDR Conversion Using Conditional Diffusion

CreativityBench: Evaluating Agent Creative Reasoning via Affordance-Based Tool Repurposing

FACTIFY-5WQA: 5W Aspect-based Fact Verification through Question Answering

FACTIFY3M: A Benchmark for Multimodal Fact Verification with Explainability through 5W Question-Answering

Technical Reports

A Dataset-Centric Survey of LLM-Agents for Data Science

Flow Symmetrization for Parameterized Constrained Diffeomorphisms

Workshop Papers

ODESolvers are also Wayfinders: Neural ODEs for Multi-Agent Pathplanning

MMT: A Multilingual and Multi-Topic Indian Social Media Dataset

SEPSIS: I can catch your lies - A new paradigm for Deception Detection