Vansh Bansal

I am a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at UT Austin, where I am fortunate to be advised by James Scott and Purnamrita Sarkar. My research lies at the intersection of high-dimensional statistics and generative modeling. I am interested in training and inference algorithms that make sampling more efficient and controllable, through better pretraining objectives, reinforcement learning, and test-time methods such as guidance and scaling. A significant body of my work also uses generative models for amortized inference in scientific applications and develops hypothesis tests for model validation.

Previously, I completed my bachelor’s degree in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where I had the privelege to be advised by Dootika Vats. I also had the opportunity to work with the amazing Piyush Rai, Vipul Arora and Ashutosh Modi.

Beyond work, I am an Indian classical vocalist and I enjoy going for hikes.

PS: I’m happy to offer advice and feedback to students applying to graduate programs in statistics, machine learning or related fields, especially those for whom this type of feedback would usually be unavailable. The best way to reach out to me is by email.