Harshit Sikchi

hsikchispam[at]utexas.edu

Harshit Sikchi

About

I’m a researcher at OpenAI with contributions to GPT-OSS and GPT5.x , models which marked significant leap in artificial intelligence. I work on reinforcement learning methods that help agents learn from a mix of signals—experience, demonstrations, and feedback—so they can generalize better and make reliable decisions in complex environments. During my Ph.D., I developed new approaches for off-policy RL (Dual RL, CPL), Inverse RL (f-IRL, SMORe) and Unsupervised RL (RLZero, PSM, RLDP).

Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at UT Austin, co-advised by Prof. Scott Niekum and Prof. Amy Zhang. Before that, I was a Master’s student in Computer Science (2019–20) at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked in the Robot Perceiving and Doing Lab with Prof. David Held. I’ve also worked on imitative motion planning at Uber ATG, reinforcement learning for large action spaces during an internship at NVIDIA, and semantic segmentation during time at ETH Zurich.

I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, supported by the Aditya Birla Scholarship (2015–19). At IIT Kharagpur, I spent most of my time building autonomous driving systems in the Autonomous Ground Vehicle Lab with Prof. Debashis Chakravarty, leading perception and planning efforts (lane detection, Frenet planning, Hybrid A* planning, and segmentation). I also completed my bachelor’s thesis on safe reinforcement learning with Prof. Pabitra Mitra. Outside of research, I enjoy tennis, badminton, skiing, running, hiking, and traveling.

News

Talks, Teaching and Reviewing