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Aditya Grover

Co-founder and CTO, Inception

  • Co-founder and CTO, Inception1
  • Assistant Professor of Computer Science, leading the Machine Intelligence (MINT) group, UCLA1

Aditya Grover is a co-founder and the CTO of Inception, a company developing fast, parallel large language models based on diffusion, and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, where Grover leads the Machine Intelligence (MINT) group. Grover's research sits at the intersection of generative models, reinforcement learning and applications to scientific discovery.1

At a glance

Current roles
Co-founder and CTO +1 more
Companies
Inception, UCLA
Sector
Company
Education
UCLA
Work listed
3
Honors
7
Sources cited
7
Profile reviewed

Career

Grover's site lists earlier research work at Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research and OpenAI, and a gap year as a research scientist at Meta's Fundamental AI Research group.1

Grover now leads the MINT group at UCLA and is co-founder and CTO of Inception, whose team launched Mercury, a family of commercial-scale diffusion language models.12

Research

With Jure Leskovec, Grover co-authored node2vec, a method for learning feature representations of nodes in networks. Later work includes the Decision Transformer, which treats reinforcement learning as sequence modeling, and ClimaX and Stormer for machine-learning weather forecasting.3451

Grover is also the senior author of d1, a paper on scaling reasoning in diffusion language models through reinforcement learning.6

Work and contributions

  • Mercury Proprietary product

    Senior author of the 2025 Mercury report on Inception's commercial-scale diffusion language models, which are trained to predict multiple tokens in parallel.21

  • Decision Transformer Published research

    Co-author of the 2021 Decision Transformer paper, which casts reinforcement learning as conditional sequence modeling with a transformer.4

  • ClimaX Published research

    Senior author of ClimaX, a 2023 foundation model for weather and climate.5

Timeline

  1. Co-authored node2vec, a paper on scalable feature learning for networks.3
  2. Co-authored the Decision Transformer paper on reinforcement learning via sequence modeling.4
  3. Was the senior author of ClimaX, a foundation model for weather and climate.5
  4. Was the senior author of d1, on scaling reasoning in diffusion LLMs with reinforcement learning.6
  5. Was a senior author of the Mercury report on Inception's diffusion language models.2

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

Honors and recognition

  • ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award · ACM SIGKDD, 20217
  • NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award · Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 20217
  • Kavli Fellowship · US National Academy of Sciences, 20237
  • NSF CAREER Award · National Science Foundation, 20247
  • AI2050 Early Career Fellowship · Schmidt Sciences, 20247
  • IJCAI Computers and Thought Award · International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 20257
  • Okawa Foundation Research Award · Okawa Foundation, 20257

Where they work

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References

7 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Aditya Grover — homepageAditya Grover · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion (arXiv 2506.17298)arXiv · Paper · published Jun 17, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks (arXiv 1607.00653)arXiv · Paper · published Jul 3, 2016 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling (arXiv 2106.01345)arXiv · Paper · published Jun 2, 2021 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate (arXiv 2301.10343)arXiv · Paper · published Jan 24, 2023 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. d1: Scaling Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning (arXiv 2504.12216)arXiv · Paper · published Apr 16, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  7. Aditya Grover — awardsAditya Grover · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026