Bhagyesh Kumar

Bhagyesh Kumar
(@invi-bhagyesh)

I am currently a sophomore in the Department of Mathematics at MIT Manipal , majoring in Mathematics and Computing. I am part of the SPAR Spring 2026 cohort, where I am working on emergent misalignment under Prof. Lionel Levine from Cornell University. I am also working on evaluation awareness as an AI safety researcher at Algoverse under Jord Nguyen. In addition, I am a member of the MRM Research AI Team where I was mentored by A S Aravinthakshan.

I have previously worked on adversarial attacks, which led to my interest in trustworthy machine learning. Overall, my research interest lies in AI safety and Trustworthy AI. See my research and what I'm up to now.

Other things I enjoy include competitive programming, reading blogs, and meeting new people. Feel free to reach out and say hi at (invi.bhagyesh@gmail.com), though I usually respond faster on social apps.

publications

TopoReformer: Mitigating Adversarial Attacks Using Topological Purification in OCR Models
AAAI 2026 Workshop on AI for Cyber Security (Oral)
Bhagyesh Kumar*, A S Aravinthakshan*, Akshat Satyanarayan*, Ishaan Gakhar, Ujjwal Verma

publications

TopoReformer: Mitigating Adversarial Attacks Using Topological Purification in OCR Models
AAAI 2026 Workshop on AI for Cyber Security (Oral)
Bhagyesh Kumar*, A S Aravinthakshan*, Akshat Satyanarayan*, Ishaan Gakhar, Ujjwal Verma

reading log

papers, blogs, and talks I've been reading

what i'm up to now

  • Researching emergent misalignment at Cornell under SPAR Feb 2026
  • Working on evaluation awareness at Algoverse Jan 2026
  • Received $1000 scholarship to present TopoReformer at AAAI in Singapore Nov 2025
  • TopoReformer(v2) accepted at AAAI Workshop 2026 Nov 2025

how i fail

  • AAAI Undergraduate Consortium Proposal not accepted Nov 2025
  • TopoReformer(v1) rejected from NeurIPS Workshop 2025 Oct 2025
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