Niyati Rawal

I am currently working as a Joint Postdoctoral Researcher at IAIRO-BITS, India. Previously, I was an Early-Stage Researcher in the PERSEO project at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy.

My research focuses on combining vision and language for applications in Human–Robot Interaction. I have also worked on emotion expression in Human–Robot Interaction (TU Darmstadt, Germany), human activity recognition and prediction (Inria Nancy, France), the comparison of deontology and utilitarianism in a Pac-Man game setting using knowledge representation (Rovira i Virgili University / Open University of Catalonia, Spain), as well as investigating the mechanisms underlying the development of visual attention to faces during infancy (Osaka University, Japan).

news

Apr 3, 2025	I defended my PhD thesis titled “Integration of Vision and Language for Physical and Cognitive Human-Robot Interaction”!
Apr 8, 2024	Our paper titled “AIGeN: An Adversarial Approach for Instruction Generation in VLN” has got accepted at CVPRW 2024 (7th Multimodal Learning and Applications Workshop).
Jan 14, 2024	I will be a visiting PGR student at University of Manchester, United Kingdom as a part of my secondment in the PERSEO project.

selected publications

ICSR

Multimodal Dialogue for Empathetic Human-Robot Interaction

Niyati Rawal, Rahul Singh Maharjan, Giacomo Salici, Riccardo Catalini, Marta Romeo, Roberto Bigazzi, Lorenzo Baraldi, Roberto Vezzani, Rita Cucchiara, Angelo Cangelosi, and others

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{rawal2025multimodal,
  title = {{Multimodal Dialogue for Empathetic Human-Robot Interaction}},
  author = {Rawal, Niyati and Maharjan, Rahul Singh and Salici, Giacomo and Catalini, Riccardo and Romeo, Marta and Bigazzi, Roberto and Baraldi, Lorenzo and Vezzani, Roberto and Cucchiara, Rita and Cangelosi, Angelo and others},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR)},
  year = {2025},
}

Unmute: Unifying Navigation and Multimodal Dialogue-Like Text Generation

Niyati Rawal, Roberto Bigazzi, Lorenzo Baraldi, and Rita Cucchiara

Available at SSRN 4777514 2025

Bib HTML

@article{rawal4777514unmute,
  title = {Unmute: Unifying Navigation and Multimodal Dialogue-Like Text Generation},
  author = {Rawal, Niyati and Bigazzi, Roberto and Baraldi, Lorenzo and Cucchiara, Rita},
  journal = {Available at SSRN 4777514},
}

CVPRW

AIGeN: An Adversarial Approach for Instruction Generation in VLN

Niyati Rawal, Roberto Bigazzi, Lorenzo Baraldi, and Rita Cucchiara

In 2024

Accepted in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{rawal2024aigen,
  title = {AIGeN: An Adversarial Approach for Instruction Generation in VLN},
  author = {Rawal, Niyati and Bigazzi, Roberto and Baraldi, Lorenzo and Cucchiara, Rita},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.10054},
  year = {2024},
  emphasis = {Accepted in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop},
}

Frontiers

ExGenNet: Learning to Generate Robotic Facial Expression Using Facial Expression Recognition

Niyati Rawal, Dorothea Koert, Cigdem Turan, Kristian Kersting, Jan Peters, and Ruth Stock-Homburg

Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2022

Bib HTML

@article{rawal2022exgennet,
  title = {ExGenNet: Learning to Generate Robotic Facial Expression Using Facial Expression Recognition},
  author = {Rawal, Niyati and Koert, Dorothea and Turan, Cigdem and Kersting, Kristian and Peters, Jan and Stock-Homburg, Ruth},
  journal = {Frontiers in Robotics and AI},
  volume = {8},
  pages = {730317},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {Frontiers Media SA},
}