Vashisth Tiwari
PhD @ Carnegie Mellon | Previously- SR @ Google
Hi! 👋
I'm a first-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, advised by Emma Strubell and Zico Kolter.
My research focuses on making better and more efficient smaller models through improvements to both training and data. I'm particularly interested in distillation, synthetic data generation, and reinforcement learning for post-training.
I’ve been fortunate to learn from wonderful mentors, including Giulia DeSalvo (DeepMind), Beidi Chen (CMU), Lucio Dery (CMU/DeepMind), and Clara Na (CMU).
Before the PhD, I completed my Masters in ECE at CMU and a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Rochester. I was a Rhodes Scholarship Semi-Finalist (India) and received the Harry W. Fulbright Prize for experimental physics. In my past life, I worked on quantum sensing and computational astrophysics.
I am looking for summer 2026 internships—feel free to reach out if you see a good fit :).
Outside of work, I love photography—check out my portfolio and Instagram. I spent much of my life playing badminton, including on the team at the University of Rochester, and now I'm playing tennis.
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 :).
news
| May 19, 2025 | Student Researcher @GoogleResearch (📍Seattle) w/ Giulia DeSalvo on synthetic data for post-training |
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| May 15, 2025 | ACL Main (Energy considerations on LLM inference) |
| Apr 14, 2025 | Will be joining CMU-LTI PhD Fall’25 cohort |
| Jan 23, 2025 | ICLR'25 (MagicDec) |
| Aug 19, 2024 | Released MagicDec: Breaking Throughput-Latency Trade-off for Long Context Generation with Speculative Decoding. Blog |