Insane. A 26-year-old from Chandigarh just got a paper accepted at ICML. As a solo independent researcher. From India. His name is Kunvar Thaman (@__kunvar__). For context, since ChatGPT launched 3.5 years ago, only two other solo independent researchers have achieved this. Globally. Papers at ICML are typically dominated by big AI labs/institutions, eg OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Stanford, and MIT. The research Kunvar did to pull this off was backed by a $2.5k grant from Exception Raised (@except_raised), an Indian non-profit that funds remarkable Indian AI researchers. Kunvar’s paper is about AI agent reward hacking. He created the Reward Hacking Benchmark (RHB), a sandboxed test environment where advanced AI models are given multi-step tasks using tools like files, code execution, and automated checks. The benchmark measures how honestly the model gets to the right answer.