Research Scientist @ Lila Sciences — AI for Life Science, Boston

Hello, I'm Arushi Jain.

I’m a Research Scientist at Lila Sciences working at the intersection of reinforcement learning, LLMs, and life sciences. I work on adaptive curriculum-learning methods for multi-task training to improve data efficiency and enable capable generalist scientific models.

I earned my PhD at McGill University and Mila where I was advised by Doina Precup .Broadly, I am interested in building data-efficient, self-exploratory RL algorithms that scale robustly to complex environments.

Arushi Jain portrait

Research Focus

Reinforcement Learning

Data-efficient, safe and reliable RL algorithms for complex environments.

AI for Life Science

Scalable RL for LLMs in life-science with focus on generalist reasoning.

Exploration

Novel strategies for effective exploration including self-supervised settings.

Experience

Sept 2026 – Present

Lila Sciences

Research Scientist, Reinforcement Learning
Boston
RL for AI-for-Life Science.
Fall 2024

Microsoft Research

AI4Science Research Intern
Amsterdam
Molecular drug discovery.
Host: Elise Van Der Pol
Fall 2022

Meta AI Lab (FAIR)

Research Scientist Intern
Paris
Self-supervised framework for integrating exploration and representation in zero-shot setting.
Host: Alessandro Lazaric
Summer 2022

Amazon

AI Research Intern
(Remote / USA)
RL for recommender systems.
2019 – 2026

McGill University

PhD in Computer Science (AI)
Montreal
Reinforcement Learning, Safety in AI and exploration.
Advisor: Doina Precup
Fall 2019

SportlogiQ

RL Research Fellow
Montreal
Bisimulation Metrics for Sports.
Host: Norm Ferns
Summer 2018

Borealis AI

Research Scientist Intern
Edmonton
Host: Nidhi Hedge
2016 – 2017

Microsoft Research India

ML Research Fellow
Bangalore
Unsupervised hierarchical monitoring for service diagnostic.
2012 – 2016

IIIT-Delhi

B.Tech in Computer Science
New Delhi
Advisor: Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh

News & Updates

Recent highlights.

12/03/2026

I will be attending AI for Life Science Workshop, Barbados 2026.

03/01/2026

Gave talk on "Adaptive Exploration for Data-Efficiency" at MSR, India.

01/10/2024

Started internship at Microsoft Research (MSR) Amsterdam with Elise Van Der Pol in a molecular drug discovery.

09/07/2024

Attending the TTIC workshop on “Adaptive Learning in Complex Environments”.

27/03/2024

Gave a talk on “Towards Painless Policy Optimization for Constrained MDPs” at the Mila-RL Workshop.

Research

Selected publications.

GVFExplorer thumbnail

GVFExplorer: Adaptive Exploration for Data-Efficient General Value Function Evaluations

Arushi Jain, Josiah P. Hanna, Doina Precup

NeurIPS, 2024

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Towards Painless Policy Optimization for Constrained MDPs

Arushi Jain, Sharan Vaswani, Reza Babanezhad, Csaba Szepesvari, Doina Precup

UAI and RLDM, 2022

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Variance Penalized On-Policy and Off-Policy Actor-Critic

Arushi Jain, Gandharv Patil, Ayush Jain, Khimya Khetarpal, Doina Precup

AAAI, 2021