ML PhD · Georgia Tech

Megha Thukral

I am a PhD student at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. My research focuses on generalizable representation learning for health sensing, building machine learning models for sensor data and clinical structured text that generalize across users, devices, home layouts, and clinical settings. My research tackles distribution shift in health sensing under varying levels of data and label availability: adapting wearable HAR models with limited supervision, transferring across heterogeneous smart-home environments , and learning generalizable representations with self-supervised pretraining for physiological signals and for structured clinical records. I previously interned at the Samsung Research America Digital Health Lab (Biomarkers team), and at Bloomberg AI Group. I am thankful to be advised by Prof. Thomas Ploetz, and grateful to be funded by Optum AI and NSF AI-CARING.

Megha Thukral
latest

News

Dec 2025

Our Health Foundation Models project at Samsung Research America received the SRA President Award 2025.

Nov 2025

AgentSense accepted to AAAI 2026: virtual sensor data via LLM agents in simulated homes.

Nov 2025

Wavelet-Based Masked Multiscale Reconstruction for PPG accepted at the NeurIPS 2025 Time Series for Health workshop.

May 2025

Joined Samsung Research America's Digital Health Lab (Biomarkers team) as a research intern.

Jan 2025

TDOST accepted to ACM IMWUT: layout-agnostic smart-home activity recognition via textual sensor descriptions.

Oct 2024

Cross-Domain HAR accepted to ACM TIST: few-shot transfer learning for human activity recognition.

Aug 2024

Deployed our layout-agnostic HAR system in the Georgia Tech Aware Home for the NSF AI CARING demo.

Oct 2023

Co-authored paper at ISWC 2023: how much unlabeled data is really needed for effective self-supervised HAR?

archive

Publications

Also on Google Scholar.

In Submission · Under Review

under review
How Well Do Clinical Foundation Models Leverage Structured Health Data and Waveforms?
M. Thukral, et al.
Under review

A zero-shot evaluation of medical multimodal LLMs on six EHR + waveform prediction tasks, showing that waveform inputs do not yield uniform improvements over EHR alone.

under review
K9-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Canine-Centric Videos
K. Attarde*, Y. Ali*, M. Thukral, D. Bhutani, T. Plötz, Z. Kira (* co-first, † core contributor)
Under review

A canine-centric video QA benchmark (~5,000 pairs across 913 dog videos, five task categories) stress-testing long-horizon multimodal reasoning in leading multimodal LLMs beyond human-centric scenes.

under review
Hierarchical Modeling of ICD Codes in EHR Foundation Models
M. Thukral, D. G. Kang, R. P. Singh, S. K. Hiremath, K. Hänsel, T. Plötz
Under review

Two complementary mechanisms, HICD-BERT (token-level) and HICD-Graph (graph-level), for injecting ICD hierarchy into EHR foundation models, improving in-domain prediction and cross-dataset transfer.

2026

AAAI
AgentSense: Virtual Sensor Data Generation Using LLM Agents in Simulated Home Environments
Z. Leng, M. Thukral, Y. Liu, H. Rajasekhar, S. K. Hiremath, J. He, T. Plötz
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026
ICASSP
A Personalized Real-Time Proactive Voice Memory Assistant
H. Zhou, M. M. Rahman, S.-A. Lee, B. Lu, J. Lee, C. Tanade, M. Thukral, et al.
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2026
ICASSP
Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning for Wearable Sleep Staging Using PPG and Accelerometer Signals
J. Lee, S.-A. Lee, C. Tanade, V. Nathan, M. Thukral, H. Zhou, K. S. Chun, et al.
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2026
ICLR
HiMAE: Hierarchical Masked Autoencoders Discover Resolution-Specific Structure in Wearable Time Series
S.-A. Lee, C. Tanade, H. Zhou, J. Lee, M. Thukral, M. Han, R. Choi, M. S. H. Khan, et al.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
arXiv
Wavelet-Driven Masked Multiscale Reconstruction for PPG Foundation Models
M. Thukral, C. Tanade, S.-A. Lee, J. Lee, H. Zhou, K. S. Chun, M. Gwak, et al.
arXiv:2601.12215, 2026. Currently under review. The shorter workshop version was accepted at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Learning from Time Series for Health.

2025

IMWUT
Layout-Agnostic Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes through Textual Descriptions of Sensor Triggers (TDOST)
M. Thukral, S. G. Dhekane, S. K. Hiremath, H. Haresamudram, T. Plötz
Proc. ACM IMWUT (UbiComp), 2025
ACM TIST
Cross-Domain HAR: Few-Shot Transfer Learning for Human Activity Recognition
M. Thukral, H. Haresamudram, T. Ploetz
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 16(1), 2025
NeurIPS-W
Wavelet-Based Masked Multiscale Reconstruction for PPG Foundation Models
M. Thukral, C. Tanade, S.-A. Lee, J. Lee, S. A. Desai
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Learning from Time Series for Health
NeurIPS-W
Towards On-Device Foundation Models for Raw Wearable Signals
S.-A. Lee, C. Tanade, H. Zhou, J. Lee, M. Thukral, B. Lu, S. A. Desai
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Learning from Time Series for Health
UbiComp
Generative AI and Foundation Models for Human Sensing (GenAI4HS)
H. Haresamudram, C. I. Tang, M. Thukral, V. F. Rey, S. Suh, B. Zhou, et al.
Companion of the 2025 ACM Intl. Joint Conf. on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing

2023

ISWC
How Much Unlabeled Data is Really Needed for Effective Self-Supervised Human Activity Recognition?
S. G. Dhekane, H. Haresamudram, M. Thukral, T. Plötz
Proc. 2023 Intl. Symposium on Wearable Computers
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Contact

I am always happy to chat about my research and looking for collaborators.