Tejas Polu

About Me

Hi 👋🏽 I’m Tejas Polu, a 3rd year undergraduate student advised by Prof. Xin (Eric) Wang and Prof. David T. Lee in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

Research Interests

• MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models): Building and evaluating models that understand and generate across text, vision, and other modalities.
• AI for Accessibility: Creating adaptive ML techniques that broaden access and respond to diverse user needs in real-world settings.
• Human-in-the-Loop: Integrating human feedback with automated learning to steer model behavior and safeguard reliability.

News

• [Jun. 2025] I am presenting our paper at the ICML ‘25 WM workshop! [Link]
• [May. 2025] I am presenting our research at the ITCR ‘25 Trainee Symposium! [Link]
• [Apr. 2025] Our paper received the UCSC Deans’ Undergraduate Research Award [Link]
• [Mar. 2025] Our paper was accepted into the CHI ‘25 Human-AI workshop! [Link]

Publications

Experience

• Amazon - Software Developer Intern, Summer 2025

Teaching

• CSE 142 - Machine Learning
• CSE 101 - Data Structures & Algorithms
• CSE 120 - Computer Architecture
• CSE 13S - Computer Systems