Hello! I am Adithya Bhaskar, a second-year Ph.D. student at Princeton University, advised by Prof. Danqi Chen. Prior to joining Princeton, I completed my B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where I completed my Bachelor’s Thesis under the supervision of Prof. Sunita Sarawagi. I am fortunate to have previously interned under Prof. Greg Durrett at UT Austin, where I was first exposed to Large Language Models. Prior to that, I interned at Uppsala University under Prof. Parosh Abdulla.

Research Interests

I am curious about the inner workings of language models. We can throw together a nice looking loss function, a reasonable training loop, some compute and lots of data - and voila! A model starts generating near-fluent text. But, what does it learn? Does it reverse-engineer rules of grammar? At the start of my PhD, I wrote my interests down as:

• How can we best port human knowledge of Natural Language (e.g. linguistic structure, disambiguation of context, and so on) to a Language Model by modifying the model, training process and/or the data? More practically, can this lead us to better parameter and data efficiency?
• Humans find it hard to learn languages without any visual cues or explanations, but it is easy for LMs to do so. Do they know something we don’t? Can we reverse engineer more efficient ways to think about Language from them?

Not all of my interests are this abstract: how do we best train a language model? What data mixes? What optimizer? What architecture? Does «insert method» work for «insert desired outcome»? I also find myself thinking about scaling laws, post-training and the social impacts of language models these days.

Updates

• [09/24] I will be at NeurIPS to present Edge Pruning (spotlight)!
• [06/24] I will present my Heuristic Core paper at ACL (Oral, Main). See you there!
• [04/24] Gave an invited talk at Amazon AWS (Responsible AI team).
• [04/24] Named a Hisashi and Masae Kobayashi *67 Fellow.
• [08/23] Joined Princeton University!
• [08/23] Graduated from IIT Bombay with Honors.
• [08/23] Happy to be awarded the Thomas A. Dooie Class of 1974 Research Award for my Bachelor’s Thesis!
• [05/22] Excited to intern with Prof. Greg Durrett at UT Austin over the summer!