Vashisth Tiwari

Hi! I’m Vashisth; also go by Vash. I currently work as a Research Assistant with Prof. Emma Strubell where I am working on synthetic data, mathematical reasoning, and green-Ai. I will be joining LTI PhD cohort in Fall ‘25. I am broadly interested in improving LLMs in reasoning and data-scarce areas, model compression, and optimizing LLM inference.

I did MS in the ECE Dept at Carnegie Mellon University in 2024. Before this, I studied Physics & Mathematics at the University of Rochester (‘2023).

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.

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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!