Updates

News

Recent

June 2026: Deeply honored and grateful to receive the 2025-2026 Dr. William S.C. Chang Best Dissertation Award from the UC San Diego ECE Department.
May 2026: Recognized as a Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026.
April 2026: Our SOMA-SQL system topped the Spider 2.0 Lite leaderboard, advancing enterprise Text-to-SQL under the NL2Data theme.
March 2026: Served as Chair of the Student Research Workshop (SRW) at EACL 2026, the first EACL conference hosted in Africa. The workshop saw a 3x increase in submissions compared to the previous EACL SRW. Grateful to Prof. Aline Villavicencio for the opportunity.
December 2025: Our work DreamPRM will be presented at NeurIPS 2025. DreamPRM achieved first place on the MathVista leaderboard and was featured by UCSD News.
November 2025: Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025: Improving the Language Understanding Capabilities of Large Language Models Using Reinforcement Learning (Findings) and Can Prompting Simulate Knowledge Cutoff in Large Language Models? (Main Conference).
October 2025: Oracle published a blog post highlighting our work on NL2SQL related to the Archer Challenge, [Blog].
October 2025: Our system OraPlan-SQL secured 1st place in the 2025 Archer NL2SQL Challenge, a reasoning-focused bilingual Text-to-SQL benchmark. The work will be presented at IJCKG 2025.
August 2025: Gave a talk on AI Safety through Watermarking at the University of Exeter [Talk]. Thanks to Prof. Aline Villavicencio for the invitation.
August 2025: Completed the MicroMBA program at the UC San Diego Rady School of Management, gaining insights from startup founders and business leaders on entrepreneurship, product strategy, and innovation.
June 2025: Finished my PhD, hurray! My thesis is available [PDF].
June 2025: Our method DreamPRM for multi-modal LLM reasoning achieves first place on the MathVista leaderboard.
June 2025: Our work on re-weighting pretraining objectives for task-adaptive pre-training has been accepted to TMLR'25.
March 2025: Our work on downstream task guided continual pretraining has been accepted to TMLR'25.
February 2025: Gave a talk on LLM watermarking at UT Austin.
December 2024: Our work Transformer Architecture Search for Improving Out-of-Domain Generalization in Machine Translation has been accepted to TMLR'24.
May 2024: Our work Token-Specific Watermarking with Enhanced Detectability and Semantic Coherence for Large Language Models has been accepted to ICML'24.
March 2024: Two papers accepted to NAACL'24.

Earlier Updates

January 2024: Happy to share that our paper "Improving image classification of gastrointestinal endoscopy using curriculum self-supervised learning" has been accepted to the journal Scientific Reports, Nature Portfolio.
November 2023: Delighted to announce that I have successfully advanced to candidacy following my qualification exam. Committee: Pengtao Xie, Nuno Vasconcelos, Siavash Mirarab, Julian McAuley. My presentation slides can be found here.
November 2023: My work on adaptive data augmentation for long COVID-19 literature classification has been accepted to Scientific Reports, Nature Portfolio. I would like to thank the editor and the reviewers for their insightful feedback on our work.
November 2023: Gave a talk on my research at the IEEE YP Graduate Seminar Series - Session 4. The keynote speaker was Dr. Rangarajan Sampath, Senior VP and Head of the Center for Innovation in Diagnostics at Siemens Healthineers. The video can be found here.
October 2023: TA'ing for the OG course, Statistical learning, ECE271A with Professor Nuno Vasconcelos.
June 2023: Started research internship with Input Experience NLP team at Apple Park, Cupertino. It was great working with industry experts, Dr. Vivek Kumar Rangarajan, Leo Xu, Shivangi Mahto, and Barada Acharya.
June 2023: Achieved a 100% acceptance rating as a Teaching Assistant for the course ECE 208 - Computational Evolutionary Biology with Professor Siavash Mirarab, based on student feedback.
May 2023: Our work titled Bi-level Finetuning with Task-dependent Similarity Structure for Low-resource Training has been accepted at ACL 2023. Thank you Tencent for this opportunity.
January 2023: Got my Master's degree.
November 2022: Successfully passed my preliminary exam. Committee: Professor Pengtao Xie, Professor Behrouz Touri, and Professor Florian Meyer.
July 2022: Presented my work, A Multi-Level Optimization Framework for End-to-End Text Augmentation, as an oral presentation at NAACL 2022. The presentation video is available here.
June 2022: Started research internship at Tencent AI at Bellevue. It was great working with Lifeng Jin, Linfeng Song, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu.
April 2022: Our work titled A Multi-Level Optimization Framework for End-to-End Text Augmentation has been accepted at Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
January 2022: TA'ed for Deep Generative models with Professor Pengtao Xie.
October 2021: I had the privilege of delivering a lecture to approximately 200 students. Please find the recording here.
September 2021: TA'ing for the highly acclaimed Linear Algebra course, instructed by Professor Piya Pal.
May 2021: I mentored high school students through the ENLACE program on a project titled "Deep Learning Algorithms for Disease Segmentation in Chest X-rays." Their work is detailed in the final report.
November 2020: I have been elected as the PhD representative for the ECE Graduate Student Council.
September 2020: Started my PhD at University of California, San Diego.
June 2020: Graduated from IIT, Hyderabad.
May 2020: Academic Excellence Award for highest CGPA.
July 2018: Achieved Microsoft Azure Award in Engineering the Eye-2018 hackathon.