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Contact

• Email: sarthakchitt@gmail.com / sarthak.chittawar@research.iiit.ac.in
• Phone: +91 9686719245
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarthak-chittawar
• GitHub: github.com/sarthakchittawar

Education

• B.Tech + M.S. by Research in Computer Science and Engineering, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (Nov. 2021 - July 2026).

Experience

• AI Research Intern, IBM Research - Bengaluru, Karnataka (May 2025 - Aug. 2025).
  • Engineered an end-to-end pipeline for extracting unstructured tabular data from PDFs into accurate CSVs, improving significantly on previous work. Patent/paper submission ongoing.
  • Developed QA and summary models using RAG-based few-shot prompting on an SQL backbone for user interaction.
  • Worked on methane emission rate prediction from hyperspectral satellite data and local wind speeds by fine-tuning the Prithvi-V1-100 model pretrained with spatial-spectral patching.
  • Received a pre-placement offer after completing the internship.
• Undergraduate Researcher, Robotics Research Centre, IIIT Hyderabad (May 2023 - Present).
  • Work on mobile robotics and computer vision, with a focus on MASt3R-guided topological navigation and pixel-relative representations.
  • Published research on topological navigation at IEEE ICRA 2026 and IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026.
  • Advised by Prof. K. Madhava Krishna.
• Machine Learning Intern, Stealth Startup - Hyderabad, Telangana (June 2024 - Aug. 2024).
  • Developed a YOLO-based framework for detecting defects in electric power lines.
  • Built model architecture components from scratch and handled data preprocessing and training.

Publications

PixelLoop: Shortcut Topological Navigation with Pixel-Level Loops

Sarthak Chittawar, Vansh Garg, Aditya Vadali, Krish Pandya, Rohit Jayanti, Sourav Garg, K. Madhava Krishna. (2026). "PixelLoop: Shortcut Topological Navigation with Pixel-Level Loops." IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026).

MASt3R-Nav: WayPixel Navigation in Relative 3D Maps

Vansh Garg, Rohit Jayanti, Krish Pandya, Sarthak Chittawar, Siddharth Tourani, Muhammad Haris Khan, Sourav Garg, K. Madhava Krishna. (2026). "MASt3R-Nav: WayPixel Navigation in Relative 3D Maps." Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Towards Global Localization using Multi-Modal Object-Instance Re-Identification

Aneesh Chavan, Vaibhav Agrawal, Vineeth Bhat, Sarthak Chittawar, Siddharth Srivastava, Chetan Arora, K. Madhava Krishna. (2025). "Towards Global Localization using Multi-Modal Object-Instance Re-Identification." Proceedings of the 2025 Advances in Robotics (Oral).

Projects

• Medmini (NLP, LLMs, React.js, Flask, Docker) - Oct. 2023.
  • Collaborated on a lightweight LLM-based medical data answering system for edge devices.
  • Built for less than 3 GB RAM, 0 VRAM, and sub-3-second inference.
  • Deployed through the Android Expo Go app and awarded 2nd place by Qualcomm at Megathon 2023.
• Image Style Transfer using Transformers (Computer Vision, NLP) - Apr. 2024.
  • Enhanced a CVPR 2022 transformer-based image style transfer architecture with content-aware positional encoding.
  • Integrated CLIP for text-based image retrieval and optical flow for video style transfer.
• Fast Inference using Speculative Decoding (NLP, Machine Learning, PyTorch) - Nov. 2024.
  • Implemented speculative decoding using knowledge distillation and NLP methods to improve inference times for translation and generation tasks.
  • Improved on the baseline with online speculative decoding between draft and target models.
• A Study in Mechanistic Interpretability - Grokking (NLP, LLMs, AI Safety) - Apr. 2024.
  • Studied mechanistic interpretability and AI safety through grokking experiments on a toy language model.

Skills

• Languages: Unix Bash, C/C++, Python, Java, HTML/CSS, SQL, x86 Assembly, JavaScript, GLSL Shading Language.
• Technologies: Linux, Git, MERN stack, Flask, Docker, THREE.js, D3.js, OpenGL, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Weights & Biases.

Achievements and Activities

• Awarded the IndiaAI fellowship for graduate students in 2025.
• Awarded 2nd place by Qualcomm at Megathon 2023.
• Member of the Music Club and former Finance Coordinator of the Quizzing Club at IIIT Hyderabad.
• Scored All India Rank 3887 in JEE Main 2021 and All India Rank 44 in IIIT-UGEE among 9.4 lakh students.