Hi, I'm Aviral Chawla 👋

I study statistical methods on natural language, and how language models organize diverse world views.

Ph.D. Candidate in Complex Systems & Data Science at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute, University of Vermont. Co-advised by Juniper Lovato in Computational Ethics Lab and Sam Zhang in Science & Humanity Lab.

Research Interests

My research sits at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and computational social science. My thesis is focused on how AI models represent and coordinate multiple value systems, or world models. I approach this question from a both mechanistic and statistical (coming soon) lens. My curiosity also extends to exploring questions in computational social science. More about me here

Projects

Network-Aware Influence Maximization

How do you figure out who will cause the largest contagion outbreak? The problem of Influence Maximization is finding the top k nodes, such that when seeded with a contagion, will cause the largest outbreak. I developed an evolutionary algorithm that exploits the network structure to find candidates. The resulting algorithm consistently outperformed standard greedy baselines in both speed and solution quality across multiple network types.

Interactive Explainer

Publications

A. Chawla, G. Hall, J. Lovato. "MetaOthello: A Controlled Study of Multiple World Models in Transformers." arXiv:2602.23164 (February 2026).

Paper Code

B. Antonczak, M. Fay, A. Chawla, G. Rowangould. "Comprehensive and spatially detailed passenger vehicle and truck traffic volume data for the United States estimated by machine learning." Data in Brief 64 (2026) 112451.

Paper Dataset

A. Chawla, N. Cheney. "Neighbor-Hop Mutation for Genetic Algorithm in Influence Maximization." GECCO '23 Companion, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 187–190 (July 2023).

Paper

News

Jan 2026 Joined the board of the US Northeast Chapter, Complex Systems Society

Dec 2025 Attended Complex Networks Winter Workshop and "Towards a Data-Driven Science of Stories" in Santa Fe

Jul 2025 Poster at IC2S2, Norrkoping, Sweden

Jun 2025 Oral presentation and lightning talk at ICSSI 2025, Copenhagen

Jun 2025 Poster at NetSci 2025, Maastricht

Jun 2024 Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School