Ashay Athalye

email:	[email protected]
github:	@ashayathalye
twitter:	@ashayathalye
scholar:	here

Hi!

I'm Ashay and I live in San Francisco.

Currently, I'm a machine learning research scientist at a startup (in stealth) that's building next-gen neurotech. I'm also the director of a small-but-growing nonprofit, SOUL, which is working to scale up open education and make college-level course sequences like full undergraduate majors realistically learnable from free online resources. Previously, I was a researcher at the Robotics and AI Institute in Boston.

I'm guided by two aspirations in the work I pursue: advancing the frontier of technology and making the world a better place. My main interests these days are in AI and robotics (which I find to fulfill the former), and in economics and education (which I find to fulfill the latter).

I completed my S.B. (EECS, Economics, MechE) and M.Eng. at MIT. During my studies, I interned at NASA JPL, Raytheon BBN, Cruise, Microsoft Research, and Waymo. Outside of work, I love many things including taking photos, playing music, and doing outdoor sports.

Publications:

1. Ashay Athalye*, Nishanth Kumar*, Tom Silver, Yichao Liang, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling. Predicate Invention from Pixels via Pretrained Vision-Language Models. IEEE RA-L 2026.
2. Tom Silver, Ashay Athalye, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling. Learning Neuro-Symbolic Skills for Bilevel Planning. CoRL 2022.