Vashisth Tiwari

Hi! I’m Vashisth (or just Vash). I’m a second-year Master’s student in the ECE Dept at Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on AI. Before this, I studied Physics and Math at the University of Rochester. I am broadly interested in improving LLMs in reasoning and data-scarce areas, model compression, and optimizing LLM inference.

I’ve had the privilege of working with exceptional mentors across physics, math, and AI. Currently, under the mentorship of Clara Na and Lucio Dery in Prof. Emma Strubell’s lab, I am exploring model-aware and active synthetic data generation. Previously, I worked with Prof. Beidi Chen on using speculative decoding to improve throughput and latency, self-speculation by utilizing weight, activation, and contextual sparsity.

My research journey began with my work in Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument with Prof. Segev BenZvi and with Prof. Machiel Blok on superconducting qubits.

Outside of academia, I’ve had the privilege of interning at Los Alamos National Laboratory under Dr. Malcolm Boshier where I worked on optimizing quantum systems. I’ve also gained valuable experience as a Quantitative Research Intern at Mana, mentored by Max Novendstern and David Kaufman.

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When I'm not hunching over my laptop, you'll find me behind a camera lens—check out my photography portfolio. I spent much of my life playing badminton, including on the team at the University of Rochester, and now I'm attempting (and miserably failing) to learn tennis. You might also spot me tossing a frisbee at the CUT.

And yes, I love food and coffee, perhaps a bit too much. I'm always on the lookout for new spots, so if you have recommendations, send them my way!