Omkar Thawakar

PhD Researcher | Multimodal AI | Video Understanding | LLMs & Agents

PhD researcher at MBZUAI, working on multimodal reasoning, video understanding, large multimodal models (LMMs), and self-evolving AI systems, with strong focus on real-world deployment.

Omkar Thawakar

Highlights

  • [ICLR-SLLM 2025] Spotlight (Top-2%) for MobiLLaMA.
  • [CVPR 2025] Highlight for All Languages Matter (LMM Evaluation).
  • [Impact] 300K+ HuggingFace downloads across models.
  • [Award] Khalifa Fund Entrepreneurship Competition Winner (250K AED).
  • [Award] Sandook Al Watan Entrepreneurship Competitio Winner.
  • [Startup] Founder & Tech Lead @ Lawa.AI.

Spotlight Research

MobiLLaMA (ICLR 2025)

Accurate & Lightweight Fully Transparent GPT. 200K+ Downloads.

Read Paper

LlamaV-o1 (ACL 2025)

Rethinking Step-by-Step Visual Reasoning in LLMs.

Read Paper

Startups & Industry

Lawa.AI

Founder & Tech-Lead

Agentic AI platform for enterprises and businesses.

  • Multilingual, privacy-first AI agents.
  • Deployed in real organizational workflows.
  • $150K+ projected annual revenue (2026).
  • $70K pre-seed + multiple grants.

Nutrigenics.Care

Founder & CTO

AI-powered personalized nutrition platform.

  • Nutrition-GPT engine.
  • Clinical collaboration.
  • $100K+ grant funding.
  • Microsoft Founders Hub Grant($150K Technical Support).

Recent Preprints & Submitted Work

EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards
Omkar Thawakar et al.
Submitted / Preprint
CoVR-R: Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval
Omkar Thawakar et al.
Submitted / Preprint
Mobile-O: Unified Multimodal Understanding & Generation on Mobile
A. Shaker, Omkar Thawakar et al.
Submitted / Preprint
LLM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Reasoning Large Language Models
Komal Kumar, Omkar Thawakar et al.
Submitted / Preprint
View All Publications