About Me

A Hockey Legend once said that you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take. This blog is me taking a few shots at documenting the stuff that piques my interest as part of my research work or otherwise.

I am a doctoral researcher at UKP Lab under the advisement of Prof. Iryna Gurevych and Prof. Goran Glavas. I am interested in leveraging code generation to optimise LM pre-training, with an emphasis on function calling and multilinguality. I have contributed to multiple open-source LM releases. My mission is to unlock the application of LMs beyond text-only settings to areas like robot navigation and agentic workflows by improving their abilities to reason, offload computation and learn from environment feedback. I also work on preference learning methods to improve LMs’ code generation capabilities along non-functional axes like security and efficiency. My interests span all facets of improving LM pre-training efficiency, including data curation, context-length extension, modularity and sparse-expert models.

In a past life, I was an applied scientist at Amazon India, after having been a computer science dual-degree student at LTRC, IIIT Hyderabad working under the advisement of Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. My research included the intersection of machine learning and large-scale graph processing applied to social network data, towards which I also collaborated with Dr. Manish Gupta from Microsoft.

Previously, I have worked with electric vehicle startup Green Navigation as part of the Google Summer of Code program, wherein I worked towards predicting energy consumption from past telemetry data, given the chosen path and terrain information so as to alleviate the common problem of range anxiety in users of electric vehicles. Additionally, I also have an interest in computer vision and image processing having previously obtained my B.Tech with Honors working at CVIT.

I also possess a passing interest in game theory and mechanism design. I have previously, in conjunction with my research, also worked on matching algorithms on dynamic graphs with location constraints with various contemporary applications such as ride-hailing services, resource exchanges and so forth under the guidance of Prof. Sujit Gujar.

My free time is devoted to following a laundry list of sports, including Football, Rugby and Ice Hockey or at the weight room. I have been a Real Madrid supporter since 2007 (Yeah, I know, poor timing, just as Barcelona’s greatest generation was coming through) and also regularly play football.