Aryaman Gupta

Hi, I’m Aryaman, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, advised by Prof. Somil Bansal. I earned my B.Tech. in Electronics Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi.

My research focuses on uncovering failure patterns in robotic systems to enable a continuous failure-guided improvement cycle. I aim to: (a) bake safety mechanisms into their design, and (b) ensure reliable operation at runtime through lightweight guardrails.

Grab my resume, or find my work on Google Scholar. Feel free to reach out — I’m always up for discussions on robotics and AI.

news

Nov 2026	New paper out on arXiv about combining dense anomaly signals with sparse task rewards to steer flow policies for robust dexterous manipulation.
Sep 2026	New paper out on arXiv about monitoring and steering chain-of-thought reasoning in VLA policies.
Jun 2026	My paper on discovering robot failure taxonomies got accepted into IROS 2026.
Jun 2026	Starting my research internship at Honda Research Institute USA.
May 2026	Passed my PhD qualifying exams!
May 2026	My team won the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (North America) 2026.

selected publications

Preprint

GUARD: Anomaly-Informed Q-Steering for Generative Robot Policies in Dexterous Manipulation

Aryaman Gupta, Xiaoyue Wu, Rana Soltani Zarrin, and 1 more author

arXiv preprint arXiv:2611.10343, 2026

arXiv Bib PDF

@article{gupta2026guard,
  title = {GUARD: Anomaly-Informed Q-Steering for Generative Robot Policies in Dexterous Manipulation},
  author = {Gupta, Aryaman and Wu, Xiaoyue and Soltani Zarrin, Rana and Van der Merwe, Mark},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2611.10343},
  year = {2026},
}

Preprint

When Reasoning Helps Action: Monitoring and Steering Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language-Action Policies

Sathwik Karnik^*, Joseph JR. Lee^*, Aryaman Gupta, and 1 more author

arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.00601, 2026

arXiv Bib PDF Website

@article{karnik2026reasoning,
  title = {When Reasoning Helps Action: Monitoring and Steering Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language-Action Policies},
  author = {Karnik, Sathwik and Lee, Joseph JR. and Gupta, Aryaman and Bansal, Somil},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.00601},
  year = {2026},
}

IROS

Unsupervised Discovery of Failure Taxonomies from Deployment Logs

Aryaman Gupta^*, Yusuf Umut Ciftci^*, and Somil Bansal

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

arXiv Bib PDF Video Code Website

@inproceedings{gupta2025failure,
  title = {Unsupervised Discovery of Failure Taxonomies from Deployment Logs},
  author = {Gupta, Aryaman and Ciftci, Yusuf Umut and Bansal, Somil},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  year = {2026},
}