Tejas Polu
About Me
Hi 👋🏽 I’m Tejas, a senior undergraduate 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
- AI Safety: Building safer LLMs via evaluation, alignment, and red-teaming to mitigate misuse and failures.
- MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models): Building and evaluating models that understand and generate across text, vision, and other modalities.
- Human-in-the-Loop: Integrating human feedback with automated learning to steer model behavior and safeguard reliability.
News
- [Feb. 2026] Our paper was accepted to the CHI ‘26 Poster Track!
- [Jan. 2026] I submitted a paper introducing an agentic safety benchmark, SafePro. [Link]
- [Jan. 2026] I received an Honorable Mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award! [Link]
- [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 Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award [Link]
- [Mar. 2025] Our paper was accepted into the CHI ‘25 Human-AI workshop! [Link]
Publications
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ICML
ICML 2025: Building Physically Plausible World Models, ICML 2025: Test-Time Adaptation - Putting Updates to the Test -
CHI
CHI 2025: Human-AI Interaction for Augmented Reasoning -
arXiv
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CHI
Smells Like Fire: Evaluating the Impact of Olfactory Cues in VR Wildfire Evacuation TrainingCHI 2026 Poster Track
Experience
- Aida - Software Engineer Intern, Winter 2026
- Amazon - Software Development Engineer Intern, Summer 2025
- Revoteen - Software Engineer, 2021 - 2024
Teaching
- CSE 142 - Machine Learning
- CSE 144 - Deep Learning
- CSE 140 - Artificial Intelligence
- CSE 101 - Data Structures & Algorithms
- CSE 114A - Foundations of Programming Languages
- CSE 120 - Computer Architecture
- CSE 13S - Computer Systems