
Atharva Kulkarni

Hello! I am a first year CS PhD student at the University of Southern California, advised by Swabha Swayamdipta, and a member of USC NLP Group and DILL Lab. Currently, I am a visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley – Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
My current research focuses on theoretical & empirical understanding of language models. Specifically, I am interested in:
- Building a principled understanding of when & why they work / fail.
- Understanding the science behind their scaling & generalization capabilities.
- Exploring avenues for improving their reliability & trustworthiness.
I recently graduated with a Masters in Language Technologies (MLT) from Carnegie Mellon University – Language Technologies Institute, where I was fortunate to be advised by Barnabás Póczos & Graham Neubig. During my masters, I interned at Apple twice (summer ‘23 & ‘24) with the Siri & Information Intelligence group.
Before coming to CMU, I was a Predoctoral Researcher (Research Associate) at the Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2), IIIT Delhi. Even before that, I graduated with a Bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science from Savitribai Phule Pune University.
I’m eager to connect with my academic peers! If our research interests align (or diverge) in intriguing ways, I’d be delighted to explore potential collaborations or simply exchange ideas!
I am also a strong advocate for diversity and mentorship in computer science research. If you’d like to chat about navigating ML/NLP research, grad school applications, or want to collaborate on a research project, please visit the Outreach & Mentorship tab for more information.
News
Jan 2025 | Attending UC Berkeley – Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing as a visiting PhD student for the Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers Progam (Part 2) 🐻! |
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Sep 2024 | Finally our work on evaluating LLMs on comorbid mental mealth issues is out! It will be present at EMNLP 2024 main conference ![]() |
Aug 2024 | Started my PhD at USC! Excited to work with Prof. Swabha Swayamdipta and the amazing members of DILL Lab & USC NLP Group. |