Devang Kulshreshtha

I’m a Senior Research Engineer on the Embodied AI team at Cruise and a final-year ML PhD student at NYU. I believe AI safety must shape how models are trained, understood, and deployed. My research spans AI safety [2, 4], agentic safety [3, 5], model adaptation [6, 9], and vision–language models [1]. I currently train foundation perception models for safer autonomous driving.

Previously, I led the prompt-attack filter for Bedrock Guardrails at AWS as an Applied Scientist, translating adversarial-robustness research into production defenses against jailbreaks and prompt injection. I also contributed to AgentCore Policy to govern agents’ access to tools. My goal is to make increasingly capable AI systems safe enough to trust in the real world.

Before my PhD, I completed my master’s in CS at McGill/Mila and my bachelor’s at IIT (BHU) Varanasi.

Portrait of Devang Kulshreshtha

Experience

Education

  • New York UniversityOngoingPhD in ECE (ML) · GPA 4.0 / 4.0
  • McGill University & Mila2020–2022MSc in Computer Science · GPA 4.0 / 4.0
  • IIT (BHU) Varanasi2014–2018B.Tech in Computer Science · GPA 9.11 / 10

Publications & preprints

  1. Multimodal View Training: Learning More from the Same Information

    Coming soon

  2. Break Me If You Can: Self-Jailbreaking of Aligned LLMs via Lexical Insertion Prompting

    D. Kulshreshtha, H. Su, H. Jin, C. Hegde, H. Wang

    COLM 2026

  3. The Subtle Art of Defection: Understanding Uncooperative Behaviors in LLM based Multi-Agent Systems

    D. Kulshreshtha, W. Du, R. Jain, S. Doss, H. Su, S. Swamy, Y. Qi

    EACL 2026 (Industry)

  4. STAC: When Innocent Tools Form Dangerous Chains for LLM Agents

    J.-J. Li, J. He, C. Shang, D. Kulshreshtha, X. Xian, Y. Zhang, H. Su, S. Swamy, Y. Qi

    EMNLP REALM Workshop 2026

  5. Relational Priors as Convergence Pressure in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

    M. Shen, C. Shang, S. Shahriar, D. Kulshreshtha, Y. Zhang, S. Swamy, Y. Qi

    AACL 2026

  6. Sequential Editing for Lifelong Training of Speech Recognition Models

    D. Kulshreshtha, S. Dingliwal, B. Houston, N. Pappas, S. Ronanki

    INTERSPEECH 2024

  7. Retrieve and Copy: Scaling ASR Personalization to Large Catalogs

    S.M. Jayanthi, D. Kulshreshtha, S. Dingliwal, S. Ronanki, S. Bodapati

    EMNLP 2023 (Industry)

  8. Generalized Zero-Shot Audio-to-Intent Classification

    V.R. Elluru, D. Kulshreshtha, R. Paturi, S. Bodapati, S. Ronanki

    IEEE ASRU 2023

  9. Multilingual Contextual Adapters for Custom Word Recognition in Low-Resource Languages

    D. Kulshreshtha, S. Dingliwal, B. Houston, S. Bodapati

    INTERSPEECH 2023

  10. Improving Domain-Adaptive Generalization of CTC-Based ASR with Internal LM Estimation

    N. Das, M. Sunkara, S. Bodapati, J. Cai, D. Kulshreshtha, J. Farris, K. Kirchhoff

    ICASSP 2023

  11. Few-Shot Question Generation for Personalized Feedback in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

    D. Kulshreshtha, M. Shayan, R. Belfer, S. Reddy, I.V. Serban, E. Kochmar

    IJCAI-PAIS 2022

  12. Back-Training Excels Self-Training at Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Question Generation and Passage Retrieval

    D. Kulshreshtha, R. Belfer, I.V. Serban, S. Reddy

    EMNLP 2021

  13. How Emotional Are You? Neural Architectures for Emotion Intensity Prediction in Microblogs

    D. Kulshreshtha, P. Goel, A.K. Singh

    COLING 2018

  14. NLPRL-IITBHU at SemEval-2018 Task 3: Combining Linguistic Features and Emoji Pre-trained CNN for Irony Detection

    H. Rangwani, D. Kulshreshtha, A.K. Singh

    SemEval @ NAACL 2018

  15. Feature Augmented Deep Neural Networks for Collaborative Filtering

    D. Kulshreshtha

    IJCAI 2017 Workshop

  16. Prayas at EmoInt 2017: An Ensemble of Deep Neural Architectures for Emotion Intensity Prediction in Tweets

    P. Goel, D. Kulshreshtha, P. Jain, K.K. Shukla

    WASSA @ EMNLP 2017

Patents

  1. Augmenting automated speech recognition neural networks with scalable vocabularies. [US 12562151B1]
  2. Removing bias from speech recognition models using internal language model estimates. [US 12387718B1]
  3. Automated evaluation of evidence mapping models. [US 20250005063A1]
  4. Medical conversation summarization style intelligence. [US 20240428002A1]

Service & recognition

Reviewing

COLM 2026 · ACL 2026 · AAAI 2026
INTERSPEECH 2024, 2025
ACL Rolling Review 2022, 2024

Teaching

IVADO Workshop, McGill / Mila
Introduction to AI, IIT Varanasi
Introduction to Programming in C, IIT Varanasi

Recognition

MITACS Accelerate Research Scholarship
Kharusi International Science Fellowship
Shared-task winner, WASSA @ EMNLP 2017