Vashisth Tiwari

Hi! 👋

I’m a first-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s LTI, advised by Emma Strubell and Zico Kolter. Previously, I completed my master’s at CMU and a bachelor’s in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Rochester.

My research focuses on developing better, more efficient LLMs by improving training dynamics and data quality. I am particularly interested in knowledge distillation, synthetic data generation, and reinforcement learning for post-training.

I’ve been fortunate to learn from wonderful mentors. In summer 2026, I will be joining the Nemotron post-training team at Nvidia, where I’ll work with [Oleksii] (http://kuchaev.com) and Adi. In summer 2025, I was a Student Researcher with Giulia DeSalvo at DeepMind. At CMU, I’ve also worked with Beidi Chen, Lucio Dery, and Clara Na.

---

---