Sahil Sidheekh

Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science · University of Texas at Dallas

[email protected] · sahilsidheekh.com

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Education

Aug 2022 – May 2027 (expected)
Ph.D. in Computer Science
The University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, Texas
Research Focus: Tractable Probabilistic Inference, Deep Generative Models
Advisor: Dr. Sriraam Natarajan · StARLing Lab
GPA: 4.00 / 4.00
Aug 2017 – May 2021
Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Ropar (IIT Ropar)
Punjab, India
GPA: 9.19 / 10.00

Work Experience

Sep 2025 – Dec 2025
AI/ML Intern
Altir LLC
Worked on developing the POC for Cognition-DB, an enterprise AI solution that unifies diverse data modalities with ontologies for knowledge-driven reasoning and reliable decision making.
Aug 2023 – Aug 2025
Research Assistant
The University of Texas at Dallas
Researching and developing foundational methodologies in exact inference using probabilistic circuits, deep generative models, and neuro-symbolic learning techniques.
Feb 2021 – Apr 2022
AI/ML Resident
Verisk Analytics
(a) Conducted research on novel deep generative models for learning structured data distributions.
(b) Developed an interpretable data analytics platform encompassing SOTA deep learning methods.

Publications

Book Chapters

2026

Tractable and expressive generative modeling with probabilistic flow circuits

Sahil Sidheekh and Sriraam Natarajan

Neurosymbolic AI: Foundations and Applications, pages 183–222. Wiley Online Library, 2026.

Conference Papers

2026

Tractable Sharpness-Aware Learning of Probabilistic Circuits

Sahil Sidheekh, Hrithik Suresh, Vishnu Shreeram, Sriraam Natarajan, Narayanan C. Krishnan

The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026

2025

Human-in-the-loop or AI-in-the-loop? Automate or Collaborate?

Sriraam Natarajan, Sahil Sidheekh, Saurabh Mathur, Wolfgang Stammer, Kristian Kersting

The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

2025

Credibility-Aware Multi-Modal Fusion Using Probabilistic Circuits

Sahil Sidheekh, Pranuthi Tenali, Saurabh Mathur, Erik Blasch, Kristian Kersting, Sriraam Natarajan

The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2025

2025

A Unified Framework for Human-Allied Learning of Probabilistic Circuits

Sahil Sidheekh, Athresh Karanam, Saurabh Mathur, Sriraam Natarajan

The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

2025

Scalable Knowledge Graph Construction from Unstructured Text: A Case Study on Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining

Debashis Gupta, Aditi Golder, Sahil Sidheekh, Sakib Imtiaz, Sarra Alaqahtani, Fan Yang, Greg Larsen, Miles Silman, Luis Fernendez, Robert Plemmons, Sriraam Natarajan, V. Paul Pauca

The 29th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), 2025

2025

Human-Allied Relational Reinforcement Learning

FG Darvishvand, H Shindo, Sahil Sidheekh, Kristian Kersting, Sriraam Natarajan

The Twelfth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS), 2025

2024

Building Expressive and Tractable Probabilistic Generative Models: A Review

Sahil Sidheekh, Sriraam Natarajan

The 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024

2024

On the Robustness and Reliability of Late Multi-Modal Fusion using Probabilistic Circuits

Sahil Sidheekh, Pranuthi Tenali, Saurabh Mathur, Erik Blasch, Sriraam Natarajan

The 27th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), 2024

2023

Probabilistic Flow Circuits: Towards Unified Deep Models for Tractable Probabilistic Inference

Sahil Sidheekh, Kristian Kersting, Sriraam Natarajan

The 39th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2023

2022

VQ-Flows: Vector Quantized Local Normalizing Flows

Sahil Sidheekh, Chris B. Dock, Tushar Jain, Radu Balan, Maneesh K. Singh

The 38th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2022

2021

On Characterizing GAN Convergence Through Proximal Duality Gap

Sahil Sidheekh, Aroof Aimen, Narayanan C. Krishnan

Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), PMLR 139, 9660–9670, 2021

2021

On Duality Gap as a Measure for Monitoring GAN Training

Sahil Sidheekh, Aroof Aimen, Vineet Madan, Narayanan C. Krishnan

International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2021

Journal Papers

2025

Tractable Representation Learning with Probabilistic Circuits

Steven Braun, Sahil Sidheekh, Antonio Vergari, Marius Mundt, Sriraam Natarajan, Kristian Kersting

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025

2023

Adaptation: Blessing or Curse for Higher Way Meta-Learning

Aroof Aimen, Sahil Sidheekh, Bharat Ladrecha, Hansin Ahuja, Narayanan C. Krishnan

IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 5(4), 1844–1856, 2023

2023

Leveraging Task Variability in Meta-Learning

Aroof Aimen, Bharat Ladrecha, Sahil Sidheekh, Narayanan C. Krishnan

SN Computer Science, 4(5), 539. Springer, 2023

2023

EWSmethods: An R Package to Forecast Tipping Points at the Community Level Using Early Warning Signals, Resilience Measures, and Machine Learning Models

Duncan A. O'Brien, Smita Deb, Sahil Sidheekh, Narayanan C. Krishnan, Partha Sharathi Dutta

Ecography, e06674, 2023

2022

Machine Learning Methods Trained on Simple Models Can Predict Critical Transitions in Complex Natural Systems

Smita Deb, Sahil Sidheekh, Christopher F. Clements, Narayanan C. Krishnan, Partha Sharathi Dutta

Royal Society Open Science, 9(2), 211475, 2022

Workshop Papers

2025

Autoencoding Probabilistic Circuits

Steven Braun, Sahil Sidheekh, Sriraam Natarajan, Antonio Vergari, Marius Mundt, Kristian Kersting

The Eighth Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Modeling (TPM), 2025

2024

Credibility-Aware Reliable Multi-Modal Fusion Using Probabilistic Circuits

Sahil Sidheekh, Pranuthi Tenali, Saurabh Mathur, Erik Blasch, Kristian Kersting, Sriraam Natarajan

The 2nd Workshop on Deployable AI (DAI), co-located at AAAI, 2024

2023

Bayesian Learning of Probabilistic Circuits with Domain Constraints

Sahil Sidheekh, Athresh Karanam, Saurabh Mathur, Sriraam Natarajan

The 6th Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Modeling (TPM), co-located at UAI, 2023

2021

Stress Testing of Meta-Learning Approaches for Few-Shot Learning

Aroof Aimen, Sahil Sidheekh, Vineet Madan, Narayanan C. Krishnan

AAAI Workshop on Meta-Learning and MetaDL Challenge (MetaDL), PMLR 140, 38–44, 2021

2021

Task Attended Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Learning

Aroof Aimen, Sahil Sidheekh, Narayanan C. Krishnan

The 5th Workshop on Meta-Learning at NeurIPS, 2021

Preprints

2026

Geometry-Aware Probabilistic Circuits via Voronoi Tessellations

Sahil Sidheekh, Sriraam Natarajan

Preprint, Under Review, 2026

2026

Context-Specific Credibility-Aware Multimodal Fusion with Conditional Probabilistic Circuits

Pranuthi Tenali, Sahil Sidheekh, Saurabh Mathur, Erik Blasch, Kristian Kersting, Sriraam Natarajan

Preprint, Under Review, 2026

2021

Attentive Contractive Flow with Lipschitz-Constrained Self-Attention

Avideep Mukherjee, Badri N. Patro, Sahil Sidheekh, Maneesh Singh, Vinay P. Namboodiri

Preprint, Under Review, 2021

Tutorials & Workshops Organized

Jul 2024
Probabilistic Deep Generative Models
IIT Madras, India
Jan 2024
Deep Tractable Probabilistic Models
CODS-COMAD, Bangalore, India
International Conference on Data Science & Management of Data
Apr 2023
Deep Tractable Probabilistic Models
IIT Madras, India

Invited Talks

Jan 2024
Building generative models that can reason probabilistically
IIT Palakkad, India

Service

Workflow Chair
AAAI 2024
Reviewer
ICML 2026 · UAI 2025 · AAAI 2025 · NeurIPS 2024 · UAI 2024 · UAI 2023 · ECAI 2023 · JAIR · Big Data

Honors & Achievements

2025
NSF Student Travel Award
To attend The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
2017 – 2020
Top Class Merit Award
IIT Ropar
Awarded to the top 7% of students.
2016
Best Outgoing Student
MES Indian School, Doha-Qatar

Teaching Assistantships

Spring 2023
CS4337 — Programming Languages and Paradigms
UT Dallas
Fall 2022
CS4337 — Programming Languages and Paradigms
UT Dallas
Spring 2021
CS503 — Machine Learning
IIT Ropar

Technical Skills

Programming Languages

Python · C/C++ · Java · JavaScript · SQL

Frameworks & Libraries

PyTorch · TensorFlow · JAX · Pyro · Node.js · Git · Docker · Kubernetes · Linux · LaTeX

Research Focus

Probabilistic Circuits · Deep Generative Models · Normalizing Flows · LLMs · Variational Inference · GANs · Reliable AI · Multimodal Fusion · Meta-Learning