SANUP S. ARABALLI // RESEARCH OS v2.0
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Graduating Aug 2026 · Open to Research Scientist & ML Engineer roles

Sanup S.
Araballi

I make hard problems tractable.

Bilevel OptimizationSurrogate EAExplainable AIGraph NNReinforcement Learning
Explore ResearchProjectsCV
Bilevel OptimizationAAAI 2026Surrogate-Assisted EAECTA 2025Explainable AIKDD 2026Graph Neural NetworksNeurIPS ReviewerFuzzy Rule SystemsAFRL InternReinforcement LearningFUSION 2026Information CascadesSyracuse University1-Bit RAGEvol. AlgorithmsBilevel OptimizationAAAI 2026Surrogate-Assisted EAECTA 2025Explainable AIKDD 2026Graph Neural NetworksNeurIPS ReviewerFuzzy Rule SystemsAFRL InternReinforcement LearningFUSION 2026Information CascadesSyracuse University1-Bit RAGEvol. AlgorithmsBilevel OptimizationAAAI 2026Surrogate-Assisted EAECTA 2025Explainable AIKDD 2026Graph Neural NetworksNeurIPS ReviewerFuzzy Rule SystemsAFRL InternReinforcement LearningFUSION 2026Information CascadesSyracuse University1-Bit RAGEvol. Algorithms

Research impact at a glance

0PublicationsAAAI · ECTA · BEA · ARF
0+Under ReviewKDD · FUSION · in prep
0%+Compute ReductionSurrogate-assisted EA
0+Students MentoredGrad & undergraduate

Work at Air Force Research Laboratory · Collaboration with ComScore · Reviewer at NeurIPS, IJCNN, Tapia, IEEE WCCI

Publications

Selected work

All publications →
01
2026
AAAI Spring Symposium

Distilling Deep Reinforcement Learning into Interpretable Fuzzy Rules

Compressed 26,000+ agent experiences into 74 human-readable IF-THEN rules — making black-box RL certifiable for safety-critical control systems.

Key equation
IF x₁ is Ã₁ AND x₂ is Ã₂ → y = p₁x₁ + p₂x₂ + r
02
2025
ECTA / IJCCI

A Surrogate-Assisted Co-Evolutionary Framework for Bilevel Optimization

>96% reduction in computation cost on NP-hard bilevel problems. Validated on Max-Cut, extended to Gene Regulatory Networks.

Key equation
min F(x, y*) s.t. y* ∈ argmin f(x, y)
03
2021
BEA ConferenceOpen Paper Winner

Developing an Ad Viewing Retention Model for TV Comedy Through Machine Learning

80%+ accuracy predicting TV ad retention from ComScore data. Recognised in a ComScore industry press release.

Bilevel OptimizationAAAI 2026Surrogate-Assisted EAECTA 2025Explainable AIKDD 2026Graph Neural NetworksNeurIPS ReviewerFuzzy Rule SystemsAFRL InternReinforcement LearningFUSION 2026Information CascadesSyracuse University1-Bit RAGEvol. AlgorithmsBilevel OptimizationAAAI 2026Surrogate-Assisted EAECTA 2025Explainable AIKDD 2026Graph Neural NetworksNeurIPS ReviewerFuzzy Rule SystemsAFRL InternReinforcement LearningFUSION 2026Information CascadesSyracuse University1-Bit RAGEvol. AlgorithmsBilevel OptimizationAAAI 2026Surrogate-Assisted EAECTA 2025Explainable AIKDD 2026Graph Neural NetworksNeurIPS ReviewerFuzzy Rule SystemsAFRL InternReinforcement LearningFUSION 2026Information CascadesSyracuse University1-Bit RAGEvol. Algorithms

Projects

Research in action

All projects →
Deep RL · Finance

Reinforced Trading Bot

C51 Distributional DQN — consistent profitability with zero hand-crafted rules

Evolutionary Algorithms

Aerodynamic Shape Optimizer

Genetic algorithm + Blender physics — evolved minimum-drag geometries from scratch

Graph Neural Networks

Information Cascade Predictor

DFS-biased node2vec outperforms state-of-the-art CasFlow on social network data

Let's connect

Get in touch

Open to discussing research collaborations, industry opportunities, or questions about my work. Graduating August 2026 and actively exploring Research Scientist and ML Engineer roles.

Or email directly: ssarabal@syr.edu