Mohit Goyal

AI Research & Technical Lead  ·  Google (Gemini & Wearable AI)

I lead AI research and engineering at Google, working on multimodal models, memory on smart glasses, and spatial reasoning. I build systems that use images and video to understand the physical world, along with synthetic training data and tools for measuring how well those systems work. I also led perceptual comfort evaluation for Samsung Galaxy XR.

I have collaborated with researchers at CMU, UIUC, Stanford, and York University. My papers have appeared at CVPR, CHI, ISMAR, ECCV Workshops, Bioinformatics, IEEE DCC, and INTERSPEECH. I have also released open-source datasets and benchmarks.

I earned my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) (4.0 GPA), advised by Prof. Saurabh Gupta and Prof. Idoia Ochoa, and my B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi, where I received the Honda YES Award (selected among the top 14 students across all IITs).

Mohit Goyal

Research Directions

My current work asks how AI can learn from what we see and do: remember objects seen through smart glasses, answer questions about 3D spaces, and learn from synthetic data. I also study how XR displays affect comfort and movement.

Memory & Egocentric Vision

I lead development of memory systems for smart glasses at Google. These systems locate objects in real time and distinguish between similar objects seen across hours of video (+15% AUPR on visual needle-in-a-haystack tasks). In my earlier first-author CVPR 2022 work at UIUC, I showed how watching hands in everyday video can help models learn object states and ways to interact with them. We released the EPIC-STATES & EPIC-ROI benchmarks.

Spatial Reasoning & Evaluation

I lead Google's collaboration with CMU on SPLIT (ECCV 2026 Workshops, Patent Pending). SPLIT gives vision-language models tools to measure objects and distances in a reconstructed 3D scene. We tested it with Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, and Claude Opus 4.8. It reached 66.9% accuracy on VSIBench without additional training and removed 49% of baseline errors on VSTIBench. When we supplied ground-truth measurements, accuracy rose to 96.7%, pointing to perception as the main source of error.

Synthetic Data & Post-Training

I started and led MapTrace as senior author. We generate synthetic maps and route annotations, then use multimodal models to check their quality. The open-source dataset of 2 million examples has about 60,000 downloads on Hugging Face. Fine-tuning Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemma 3 27B on this data reduced path-tracing error on MapBench by 32.5%, with both models outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro.

XR Comfort & Perception

I served as Comfort Quality Lead for Google AR and the launch of Samsung Galaxy XR. Our work on evaluating comfort and movement appeared at ACM CHI 2025 and IEEE ISMAR 2026, including a study of 110 participants that measured eye movements, body motion, and physiological responses.

Selected Publications & Patents

SPLIT architecture diagram

Perception, Not Reasoning, Limits Video Spatial Understanding

Jacob Yeung, Mohit Goyal, Florian Dubost, Gary L. Vondran Jr., Federico Tombari, Deva Ramanan, Michael J. Tarr
ECCV 2026 Workshops (OpenSUN3D, WearableAI, X-Reason)  ·  Google Lead & Co-Architect; Patent Pending

SPLIT reconstructs a 3D scene from video and gives a vision-language model tools to query it. Tested with Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5, and Claude Opus 4.8, it reaches 66.9% accuracy on VSIBench, 78.3% on VSTIBench, and 71.5% on ReVSI without additional training. Supplying ground-truth measurements raises accuracy to 96.7%, showing how much errors in perception affect the results.

MapTrace pipeline overview

MapTrace: Scalable Data Generation for Route Tracing on Maps

Artemis Panagopoulou, Aveek Purohit, Achin Kulshrestha, Soroosh Yazdani, Mohit Goyal
arXiv:2512.19609, 2025  ·  Project Lead & Senior Author

MapTrace generates synthetic maps and route annotations, then checks them with multimodal models. The open-source dataset contains 2 million examples and has about 60,000 downloads. Fine-tuning Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemma 3 27B on it reduces MapBench path error (NDTW) by 32.5%, with both models outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Passthrough Rigidity study setup

Passthrough Rigidity: The Behavioral and Visuomotor Costs of Mediated Perception

Markus D. Solbach, Mohit Goyal, Sakar Khattar, Jayant Varma, Bjorn Vlaskamp, John K. Tsotsos, Konstantine Tsotsos
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 2026

A study of 110 participants measuring eye movements, body motion, and physiological responses while using video see-through displays. Participants rotated their heads at one-quarter of the usual speed, and their head and gaze movements became less coordinated during physical tasks.

Mind the GAP passthrough comparison

Mind the GAP: Geometry Aware Passthrough Mitigates Cybersickness

Trishia El Chemaly, Mohit Goyal, Tinglin Duan, Vrushank Phadnis, Sakar Khattar, Bjorn Vlaskamp, Achin Kulshrestha, Eric Lee Turner, Aveek Purohit, Gregory Neiswander, Konstantine Tsotsos
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025

Geometry-aware passthrough reduces discomfort, nausea, and disorientation in mixed-reality headsets. The study also describes the comfort evaluation protocol used for commercial Android XR hardware.

Human Hands as Probes overview

Human Hands as Probes for Interactive Object Understanding

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022  ·  First Author

Learns object states and interaction regions by observing hands in EPIC-KITCHENS videos, using self-supervised temporal and hand-object consistency objectives. Introduces EPIC-STATES (14,346 images; +9.5% mAP over ImageNet) and EPIC-ROI (+4.7 to 6.4% AP over Mask R-CNN).

JIND framework architecture

JIND: Joint Integration and Discrimination for Automated Single-Cell Annotation

Mohit Goyal, Guillermo Serrano, Josepmaria Argemi, Ilan Shomorony, Mikel Hernaez, Idoia Ochoa
Bioinformatics (Oxford), 2022 & Machine Learning in Computational Biology (MLCB), 2020  ·  First Author; Oral Presentation

JIND identifies cell types across batches of single-cell data using asymmetric adversarial alignment and rejects uncertain predictions. It runs 5 to 6 times faster than Seurat while improving classification accuracy across batches.

DZip compression model

DZip: Improved General-Purpose Lossless Compression Based on Novel Neural Network Modeling

IEEE Data Compression Conference (DCC), 2021  ·  First Author; Oral Presentation

DZip combines recurrent neural networks, residual connections, and arithmetic coding for lossless compression. It reduces compressed size by 26% compared with Gzip and 33% compared with LSTM-Compress, without prior training data.

DeepZip architecture

DeepZip: Lossless Data Compression Using Recurrent Neural Networks

IEEE Data Compression Conference (DCC), 2019  ·  First Author

DeepZip uses recurrent neural networks to estimate symbol probabilities and arithmetic coding to compress genomic, text, and other sequential data without loss. On synthetic Markov sources, it approaches the theoretical entropy limit.

Glottal Closure Instant detection

Detection of Glottal Closure Instants from Raw Speech Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Mohit Goyal*, Varun Srivastava*, A. P. Prathosh
INTERSPEECH, 2019  ·  Equal Contribution First Author

Detects glottal closure instants from raw speech waveforms using multi-scale dilated convolutional networks trained jointly for classification and regression.

Career & Academic Background

2022 to present
Google  ·  Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead, Gemini Wearable AI & Android XR

I lead work on synthetic training data (MapTrace, senior author), 3D spatial reasoning with CMU (SPLIT, Google lead), and memory on smart glasses. I also led perceptual comfort evaluation for the launch of Samsung Galaxy XR (ACM CHI 2025, IEEE ISMAR 2026).

2019 to 2022
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)  ·  M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering (GPA: 4.00 / 4.00)

I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant with Prof. Saurabh Gupta and Prof. Idoia Ochoa. My first-author papers covered self-supervised egocentric vision (CVPR 2022), adversarial representation alignment (Bioinformatics 2022 / MLCB 2020 Oral), and neural sequence compression (IEEE DCC 2021 Oral).

2015 to 2019
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi)  ·  B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (GPA: 9.08 / 10.0)

I received the Honda Young Engineer and Scientist's (YES) Award (top 14 across all IITs), the IIT Delhi Semester Merit Award (top 7% of class), and an ISCA Travel Grant (INTERSPEECH 2019). I also worked with researchers at Stanford and UIUC on neural compression (IEEE DCC 2019).