Akanksha is a Research Scientist in the Reinforcement Learning group at Sony AI. Her work spans modeling human behavior across multimodal interfaces and designing human-interactive machine-learning algorithms for sequential decision-making—covering imitation learning, interaction-grounded learning, active learning, and interactive reinforcement learning. She is especially interested in reinforcement learning theory and practice: model-based RL, latent dynamics learning, and developing algorithms with provable guarantees for policy learning. A core goal of her research is to lower real-world access barriers so end-users can benefit from robust, sample-efficient interactive systems. Previously, Akanksha was a postdoc in the Reinforcement Learning group at Microsoft Research. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, an MS in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.