About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, working with Swarat Chaudhuri in the Trishul group. My research interests lie in the intersection of formal methods and modern AI/ML, specifically in the design and verification of neurosymbolic systems.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in the Summer of 2025, advised by Jyotirmoy Deshmukh as part of the CPS-VIDA group, where I focused on the design and verification of controllers for learning-enabled cyber-physical systems, including:

• Incorporating formal methods in the design of controllers for autonomous systems through:

  • Design of reward functions for reinforcement learning agents, given temporal logic task specifications.
  • Controller synthesis for time-sensitive and safety-critical tasks.
  • Marrying automata theory with array programming and gradient-based optimization pipelines.

• Fault detection and verification of perception-based control systems, especially in the context of autonomous vehicles.

  • Use of runtime monitors to detect malfunction in perception systems, especially in the context of multi-object detection and tracking.

  Before this, I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University at Buffalo in 2018, where I also worked with Prof. Karthik Dantu at the Distributed Robotics and Networked Embedded Systems Lab.

Selected Publications

• Monitoring Spatially Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems with Alternating Finite Automata

  Anand Balakrishnan , Sheryl Paul , Simone Silvetti , Laura Nenzi and Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

  In 28th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC), 2025. (Best Paper Award)

  DOI arxiv

• Differentiable Weighted Automata

  Anand Balakrishnan and Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

  In ICML 2024 Workshop on Differentiable Almost Everything : Differentiable Relaxations, Algorithms, Operators, and Simulators, 2024.

• Motion Planning for Automata-based Objectives using Efficient Gradient-based Methods

  Anand Balakrishnan , Merve Atasever and Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

  In 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.

  DOI arxiv

• Model-Free Reinforcement Learning for Spatiotemporal Tasks Using Symbolic Automata

  Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković and Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

  In 2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2023.

  DOI arxiv PDF Poster

• PerceMon: Online Monitoring for Perception Systems

  Anand Balakrishnan , Jyotirmoy Deshmukh , Bardh Hoxha , Tomoya Yamaguchi and Georgios Fainekos

  In Runtime Verification, 2021.

  DOI arxiv

• Specifying and Evaluating Quality Metrics for Vision-based Perception Systems

  Anand Balakrishnan , Aniruddh G. Puranic , Xin Qin , Adel Dokhanchi , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Heni Ben Amor and Georgios Fainekos

  In 2019 Design, Automation Test in Europe Conference Exhibition (DATE), 2019.

  DOI PDF

• Structured Reward Shaping Using Signal Temporal Logic Specifications

  Anand Balakrishnan and Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

  In 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019.

  DOI PDF Poster

• Augmenting Visual SLAM with Wi-Fi Sensing for Indoor Applications

  Zakieh S. Hashemifar , Charuvahan Adhivarahan , Anand Balakrishnan and Karthik Dantu

  In Autonomous Robots, 2019.

  DOI

For most up-to-date publication information, check out my DBLP or Google Scholar pages.