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Arnav Jhala

Adjunct Associate Professor in the Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs
Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs
Box 90780, Durham, NC 27708-0780
1121 W Main St, Durham, NC 27701

Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations


Adjunct Associate Professor in the Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs · 2025 - Present Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs, Pratt School of Engineering

Recent Scholarly Works


A Digital Program to Promote Sexual Communication Between Early Adolescents and Parents: Development and Acceptability Testing Results.

Journal article Journal of sex research · July 2026 Family communication about puberty, relationships, and sexuality is an important component of healthy sexual development for early adolescents who are beginning puberty and navigating increased interest in sexual and romantic relationships. Yet sexual comm ... Full text Cite

Preventing Process Reward Model Hacking When Training Large Language Models on Verifiable Rewards

Conference Aamas 2026 Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems · May 24, 2026 Alignment of Large Language Models to human preferences is an active and important field of study. Recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) aims to bypass the need for costly and imprecise human preference reward data by trainin ... Full text Cite

Action-Dependent Optimality-Preserving Reward Shaping

Conference Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Aamas · January 1, 2025 Recent RL research has utilized reward shaping-particularly complex shaping rewards such as intrinsic motivation (IM)-to encourage agent exploration in sparse-reward environments. While often effective, “reward hacking” can lead to the shaping reward being ... Cite
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Education


North Carolina State University · 2009 Ph.D.
North Carolina State University · 2004 M.S.
Gujarat University (India) · 2001 A.B.