About Me

Hi! My name is Arkanath (Arka) Pathak. I work in Machine Learning, and my current research interests lie in Representation Learning and Multimodal Learning (with vision and text so far).

Since Fall 2025, I am a graduate researcher pursuing my PhD in Computer Science at UC Irvine, where I'm grateful to be working with Prof. Alex Berg. Prior to academia, I spent nine years (2016–2025) at Google, where I led several ML projects in both research and product teams. Highlights include reinforcement learning for LLMs, multimodal retrieval and distillation, AI-generated image detection, video prediction, and classification robustness (ensembles, active learning, and distribution shift). I chose to return to academia to engage in open, foundational research.

You can see my publications and my LinkedIn profile if you'd like to know more about my experience in the field.

I live in Irvine (Orange County). I grew up in Noida (UP, India) and attended IIT Kharagpur for my undergraduate study. Before this, I've lived in New York, San Francisco, and Sydney.

My hobbies include photography, music, movies, tennis, pool/snooker, and attending theater or live shows.

You can reach me at pathak.arkanath@gmail.com. I'm also active on Instagram.