Mohit Goyal

AI Research & Technical Lead Google

I lead AI research and engineering at Google, working across multimodal learning, computer vision, and spatial reasoning. I set technical direction and stay hands-on with models, training data, and evaluation.

I initiated and led MapTrace, co-architected SPLIT with CMU, and led perceptual comfort evaluation for Samsung Galaxy XR. My research spans first-author work at CVPR, senior-author research, and collaborations with CMU, UIUC, Stanford, and York University.

I earned my M.S. at UIUC, advised by Saurabh Gupta and Idoia Ochoa, and my B.Tech. at IIT Delhi. I received the Honda Young Engineer and Scientist’s Award, one of 14 recipients across the IITs.

Mohit Goyal
Computer vision & multimodal AI

Research

Input scene from Human Hands as Probes
The same scene with predicted interaction regions highlighted in red
Earlier work · CVPR 2022

Visual retrieval & egocentric vision

Leading research and engineering to improve visual needle-in-a-haystack retrieval. My earlier work studies object states and interactions by watching human hands.

Earlier CVPR research
SPLIT reconstruction of an indoor sceneSPLIT · ECCV Workshops

Spatial reasoning & evaluation

I lead Google’s collaboration with CMU on SPLIT, studying how perception and tool use shape spatial understanding in vision-language models.

Explore SPLIT
A synthetic MapTrace zoo map and annotated routeMapTrace · Google Research

Synthetic data & post-training

I initiated and led MapTrace, improving fine-grained spatial learning with synthetic supervision and 2 million open-source examples.

Explore MapTrace
Undistorted hand example from Mind the GAPUndistorted
Distorted hand example from Mind the GAPDistorted
CHI 2025 · ISMAR 2026

Human vision & passthrough

As Google AR’s Comfort Quality Lead, I connected perceptual evaluation with hardware development, studying comfort and movement.

Explore XR research

Publications

Google Scholar

9 entries

ECCV Workshops · 2026

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

I led Google’s collaboration with CMU and co-architected SPLIT, a system that gives vision-language models tools to measure reconstructed 3D scenes. It raised VSTIBench accuracy from 57.7% to 78.3% (49% fewer errors) and reached 66.9% on VSIBench, without additional training.

arXiv · 2025
Defensive publication · 2026

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

I initiated and led MapTrace as senior author, releasing 2 million annotated map and route examples. Post-training reduced Gemini 2.5 Flash’s path error on MapBench by 32.5% and improved Gemma 3 27B’s success rate by 6.4 percentage points.

ISMAR · 2026

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.

CHI · 2025

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.

CVPR · 2022

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 annotated object crops) and EPIC-ROI. On novel objects with limited labeled data, object-state recognition improves by 9.5 mAP points over ImageNet features.

Bioinformatics · 2022

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 2 to 6 times faster than ItClust in the paper's reported experiments.

IEEE DCC · 2021

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. Across evaluated real datasets, it reduces compressed size by 29% compared with Gzip and 33% compared with LSTM-Compress on average, without requiring external training data.

IEEE DCC · 2019

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.

INTERSPEECH · 2019

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 & education

2022 — Present

Google

Senior Software Engineer
& Technical Lead

Research leadership across synthetic data, spatial reasoning, and visual retrieval. Previously led perceptual comfort evaluation for the Samsung Galaxy XR launch.

Research & engineering leadership
2019 — 2022

University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign

M.S. Electrical &
Computer Engineering

Research with Saurabh Gupta and Idoia Ochoa in egocentric vision, representation learning, and neural compression.

GPA 4.00 / 4.00
2015 — 2019

Indian Institute
of Technology Delhi

B.Tech.
Electrical Engineering

Honda Young Engineer and Scientist’s Award, selected among 14 students across the IITs. Semester Merit Award and ISCA Travel Grant.

GPA 9.08 / 10.0

Contact

AI research, technical leadership, or advising.
I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

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