Amit Rand
|I'm a final-year undergraduate at UCLA studying Computer Science and Mathematics. I am pursuing a PhD in CS with an emphasis on mechanistic machine learning, computer vision, and robot learning.

About Me
I am a final-year undergraduate studying Mathematics and Computer Science at UCLA. I have recently applied to CS PhD programs to pursue my research interests in mechanistic machine learning. I am a grateful recipient of the James T. Henry and Meredith Henry UCLA Undergraduate Research Scholarship.
My research philosophy centers on building robust systems that respect the structure of underlying problems. I believe the next leap in ML will come from models that don't just fit data, but internalize domain structure by embedding priors directly into learning.
I'm currently a research assistant at the UCLA Robotic Intelligence Lab (URIL), working on physics-based retrieval augmented imitation learning advised by Professor Yuchen Cui. I'm also at the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Lab (CVIRL) at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, working on accelerated 5D MRI reconstruction using generative modeling, advised by Professor Kim-Lien Nguyen.
Skills
Experience

Undergraduate Researcher
UCLA Robotic Intelligence Lab (URIL) | September 2025 - Present
Working on physics-based data retrieval for imitation learning and synthetic data generation using VLMs and diffusion models, advised by Professor Yuchen Cui.
Research Assistant
UCLA Cardiovascular Imaging Research Lab | July 2024 - Present
Researching diffusion models for 2D, 3D, and 4D MRI reconstruction, advised by Professor Kim-Lien Nguyen and Professor Dan Ruan.

Software Development Engineer Intern
Amazon | June 2025-September 2025
Developed machine learning models to calibrate satellite phased antenna arrays for Project Kuiper, Amazon's satellite internet constellation.

Research Scientist Intern
Leidos | April 2025 - June 2025
Developed LLM and generative model based internal-facing solutions at the AI Research Accelerator Lab. Also worked with the Graph AI research group on proprietary projects.

Technical Advisor Intern
Scale AI | February 2025 - May 2025
Collaborated with AI researchers to optimize generative model performance through architectural tuning, fine-tuning strategies, and data preprocessing for complex reasoning tasks.
Software Development Engineer Intern
Q.ai | August 2024 - October 2024
Built full-stack tools and dashboards to support unbiased data generation, deployed deep learning models, and enhanced internal data pipelines under NDA.

Research Apprenticeship
Department of Biomedical Datascience | January 2024 - June 2024
Worked on computer vision machine learning models to classify strains of infectious keratits advised by Post Doctoral Scholar Tushar Mungle.

Software Development Engineer Intern
Empowerly | May 2023 - March 2024
Built full-stack features and deployed intelligent bots for marketing automation and data-driven engagement using React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and LLMs.
Research
Sketch2IL: Zero-Shot Imitation Learning via Trajectory-Based Retrieval and Human-Guided Sketch Queries
Amit Rand, Yuchen Cui
In Progress
Complex-Valued Frequency-Domain Diffusion
Amit Rand, Kim-Lien Nguyen
Under Review at MICCAI Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention 2026
Diffusion-based k-space Inpainting for Improved 5D Free-running CMR Reconstruction
Thomas Coudert, Amit Rand, Kim-Lien Nguyen
Under Review at 2026 ISMRM & ISMRT Annual Meeting & Exhibition
Beyond Conventional Transformers: A Medical X-ray Attention Block for Improved Multi-Label Diagnosis
Amit Rand, Hadi Ibrahim
Presented at NeurIPS 2025 • Poster in Workshop: Imageomics: Discovering Biological Knowledge from Images Using AI
Projects
Relevant Coursework
Courses numbered 1-99: Lower Division
Courses numbered 100-199: Upper Division
Courses numbered 200+: Graduate Level
Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Interactive Robot Learning
Reinforcement Learning
Advanced Deep Learning and Neural Nets
Deep Learning and Neural Networks
Theory of Computing
Introduction to Algorithms and Complexity
Operating Systems
Software Construction
Mathematics, Statistics
Machine Learning
Numerical Analysis I
Numerical Analysis II
Complex Analysis
Real Analysis
Linear Algebra
Probability and Statistics 2
Introduction to Probability
Contact
I'm always open to discussing new projects, opportunities, or partnerships. Feel free to reach out to me through any of the following channels.
Send me a message
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