Ayush Barik

About Me

I am deeply interested in building Systems and Algorithms for Generative Computer Vision and Audio for its potential to build an intelligence that can fundamentally understand, model, manipulate, and create within the world around us. I have collaborated with various professors, including Prof. Fan Lai, Prof. Francis Yan, and Prof. Romit Roy Choudhury.

Outside of my work, I enjoy watching anime; reading manga/manhwa/manhua, web novels; playing chess and video games; and investing.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
B.S. Computer Engineering (2023-2027)

News

(Feb 21, 2026) "RewardFlow: Generate Images by Optimizing What You Reward" was accepted to CVPR 2026!
(Sep 18, 2025) "Toward Engineering AGI: Benchmarking the Engineering Design Capabilities of LLMs" was accepted to NeurIPS 2025!
(Sep 12, 2024) Received the Illinois Engineering Achievement Scholarship!

Research

Feel free to email me if you wish to collaborate, or want to discuss something!

[6] VideoRAG+: Rethinking Graph-Structured Retrieval for Long Video Understanding (ongoing)
Ayush Barik¹, Fan Lai¹, Francis Yan¹
¹UIUC
[5] Generating High-Fidelity Room Impulse Responses using Conditional Flows (under review)
Chaitanya Amballa¹, Ayush Barik¹, Steve Lin¹, Jim Sun², Mehmet Ergezer², Vamshi Krishna Chillara², Wontak Kim², Romit Roy Choudhury^1,2
¹UIUC, ²Amazon
[4] SoundWeaver: Compositional Warm-Starting for Text-to-Audio Diffusion Serving (under review)
Ayush Barik¹, Sofia Stoica¹, Nikhil Sarda², Arnav Kethana¹, Abhinav Khanduja¹, Muchen Xu¹, Fan Lai¹
¹UIUC, ²Assured Intelligence
[3] FlashDiff: Efficient Regional Execution and Scheduling for Diffusion Model Serving (under review)
Yaqi Qiao¹, Ping He², Songrun Xie³, Ayush Barik¹, Chensong Zhang⁴, Zhengzhong Tu⁵, Fan Lai¹
¹UIUC, ²Vanderbilt University, ³HKUST, ⁴Nvidia, ⁵Texas A&M University
[2] RewardFlow: Generate Images by Optimizing What You Reward (CVPR 2026)
Onkar Kishor Susladkar¹, Dong-Hwan Jang¹, Tushar Prakash², Adheesh Sunil Juvekar¹, Vedant Shah¹, Ayush Barik¹, Nabeel Bashir¹, Muntasir Wahed¹, Ritish Shrirao¹, Ismini Lourentzou¹
¹UIUC, ²Sony
[1] Toward Engineering AGI: Benchmarking the Engineering Design Capabilities of LLMs (NeurIPS 2025)
Xingang Guo^1*†, Yaxin Li^1*, Xiangyi Kong^1*, Yilan Jiang^1*, Xiayu Zhao^1*, Zhihua Gong^1*, Yufan Zhang^1*, Daixuan Li¹, Tianle Sang¹, Beixiao Zhu¹, Gregory Jun¹, Yingbing Huang¹, Yiqi Liu¹, Yuqi Xue¹, Rahul Dev Kundu¹, Qi Jian Lim¹, Yizhou Zhao², Luke Alexander Granger¹, Mohamed Badr Younis¹, Darioush Keivan¹, Nippun Sabharwal¹, Shreyanka Sinha¹, Prakhar Agarwal¹, Kojo Vandyck¹, Hanlin Mai¹, Zichen Wang¹, Aditya Venkatesh¹, Ayush Barik¹, Jiankun Yang¹, Chongying Yue¹, Jingjie He¹, Libin Wang¹, Licheng Xu¹, Hao Chen¹, Jinwen Wang¹, Liujun Xu¹, Rushabh Shetty¹, Ziheng Guo¹, Dahui Song¹, Manvi Jha¹, Weijie Liang¹, Weiman Yan¹, Bryan Zhang¹, Sahil Bhandary Karnoor¹, Jialiang Zhang¹, Rutva Pandya¹, Xinyi Gong¹, Mithesh Ballae Ganesh¹, Feize Shi¹, Ruiling Xu¹, Yifan Zhang¹, Yanfeng Ouyang¹, Lianhui Qin³, Elyse Rosenbaum¹, Corey Snyder³, Peter Seiler⁴, Geir Dullerud¹, Xiaojia Shelly Zhang¹, Zuofu Cheng¹, Pavan Kumar Hanumolu¹, Jian Huang¹, Mayank Kulkarni⁵, Mahdi Namazifar⁵, Huan Zhang¹, Bin Hu^1†
¹UIUC, ²University of Pennsylvania, ³UC San Diego, ⁴University of Michigan, ⁵Amazon AGI

Teaching & Service

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant:

ECE220 (Computer Systems & Programming) Fall 2024, Spring 2025, Fall 2025
MATH257 (Linear Algebra w/ Computational Applications) Summer 2025
ECE364 (Programming Methods for Machine Learning) Fall 2025, Fall 2026

Reviewer:

ICLR 2027