Aditya (Spencer) Sarkar - いらっしゃいませ 
Office: 4112-D15, Brendan Iribe Center, 8125 Paint Branch Dr, College Park, MD 20742
Work Email: asarkar6 [at] umd [dot] edu
Personal Email: asnov2k [at] gmail [dot] com
I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, where I am engaged in research collaborations with Profs. Nuno Vasconcelos and David Jacobs. I research computer vision models, specifically temporal understanding in autoregressive and diffusion LLMs, with their applications to world modeling. Further, I closely collaborate with Shlok Mishra, Yi Li, V.N. Sai and Zihao Wang from Meta AI.
In my free time, I document my readings on my blog Mind Unknotted. Feel free to check it out here.
Before my Ph.D., I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, where I was advised by Prof. Sreelakshmi Manjunath and received the President of India Gold Medal (the highest distinction award) and Institute Silver Medal. My undergraduate studies were fully supported by the National Talent Search and Walmart Predoc fellowships.
I am looking for research internships for summer '26. Please reach out if you're interested in my profile.
News
[01/2026] 
MA-PaPSP got accepted at ICLR '26. See you in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
[09/2024] Excited to start my Ph.D. at University of Maryland advised by Prof. Ang Li.
[09/2023] Graduated from IIT Mandi with B.Tech. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering.
Publications & Ongoing Projects
* denotes equal contribution
Analyzing how Video-LLMs understand symbols in Multiple Choice Questions
Aditya Sarkar, Shwai He, Jiacheng Cheng, Yi Li, Shlok Mishra, David Jacobs, Ang Li, Nuno Vasconcelos.
Preprint arXiv Project Page
Quantifying the Impact of Temporal Dimensions on Video Complexity.
Aditya Sarkar, Yi Li, Jiacheng Cheng, Zihao Wang, V.N. Sai, Aashu Singh, Shlok Mishra, David Jacobs, Nuno Vasconcelos.
Preprint arXiv Project Page
Leveraging Data to Say No: Memory Augmented Plug-and-Play Selective Prediction
Aditya Sarkar, Yi Li, Jiacheng Cheng, Shlok Mishra, Nuno Vasconcelos.
ICLR 2026 arXiv Project Page
Education
University of Maryland College Park
Aug. 2024 -- Present
Ph.D. in Computer Vision, advised by Prof. Ang Li.
Indian Institute of Technology Mandi
Sept. 2019 -- June 2023
B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (President of India Gold Medal Awardee), advised by Prof. Sreelakshmi Manjunath
Academic Service
Reviewer in CVPR'26.