I am an AI Research Engineer and NLP researcher working at the intersection of language models, efficient learning, and human-centred AI. As a member of the Lingo Research Group at IIT Gandhinagar, I conducted research examining how limited annotation effort, training tokens, and examples can be allocated more effectively. My broader interests include instruction tuning, multilingual learning, personalized recommendation systems, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, data quality, and human feedback.
Current work
AI Research Engineer · Recommendation Systems
Built a recommendation engine end to end for a large Indian OTT streaming platform with 10.65M users and 1.1B viewing events: data, GPU training, batch inference for every user, evaluation and production release.
11.24M users with personalised carousels
5 models trained on 8 months of data
8-month retraining: crashing -> 6.2 h
62% -> 9.5% generic-fallback items
Continue Series hit rate 92.5%
1.7M objects released to production
RAG and semantic search
In progress
LLM with retrieval-augmented generation for natural-language content search and recommendation explanations.
Content metadata embedded with sentence transformers, indexed in Qdrant with hybrid search (dense + BM25) and re-ranking, served on an NVIDIA L40S GPU.
Vector search and real-time serving
In progress
Chose self-hosted Qdrant (HNSW) for item-item, user-item and user-user retrieval and Valkey for the real-time cache, with FAISS kept for GPU batch scoring. Zero licence cost.
Deploying on Kubernetes (EKS) for 10M+ users, with session-aware recommendations that recompute the user vector from the last few watches.
Production release
1.7M objects
Released the full-data carousels to production AWS S3: 1.7M objects moved onto the live serving path, with a verified rollback archive and a _SUCCESS signal telling the backend when data is ready.
Merged the code into the team GitHub repo.
Delivered the demo deck, requirements and sign-off tracker, weekly status reporting, and data requests for subscription, sign-up and search data.
Evaluation framework
300K+ users
Time-split offline evaluation: Hit Rate@10, Recall@10 and NDCG@10 on 300K+ users.
Automated PDF reports for editorial review of power-user and cold-user cohorts, comparing before and after against real watch history.
Used the framework to decide which models and carousels ship, including flagging shows that lagged the older models.
Scenario routing
92.5% hit rate
Routed each user to Continue Series, Welcome Back or Onboarding by lifecycle state; the 11.24M-user route index was cross-checked with 0 mismatches.
Held-out results: Continue Series 92.5% hit rate vs 71-77% for existing carousels; Welcome Back ~40% vs 16-18% (~2.3x).
Dropped genre carousels after they lost to a plain popularity list and advised against routing the New User list (9% vs 25%).
Built a FastAPI reference service with 11 carousels, 32 endpoints and a versioned data contract for the backend team.
Batch inference for every user
more than 30x faster
Redesigned the pipeline with bigger batches, local data, parallel streams and model scoring only for active users: more than 30x faster.
Generated carousels for 11.24M users; generic fallback items fell from 62% to 9.5%, and serial hit rate rose from 69% to 82%.
Data-quality discovery
36% -> 100%
Found that the content catalogue had silently stopped updating on 5 July, dropping 63% of July-August viewing from training.
Rebuilt the catalogue from raw CMS tables in Amazon Redshift, including a 15.4M-row EAV property table; events matched to a title went from 36% to 100%, and July-August training rows went from 23M to 76M.
Profiled 28.5M raw user IDs -> 10.65M real users; found that 60.6% of IDs are IP addresses, not accounts, profiled all 5 ID formats, and raised the account-ID logging gap.
GPU training at scale
6.2 h
8-month training used to crash on memory; all 5 models now retrain in 6.2 h, 40-100x faster per training row.
1.1B events -> 371M training rows (7.8 GB) from one local extract; data loading went from hours to minutes.
Sparse GPU embedding updates 106 -> 3.3 ms per step (32x); vectorised data prep cut RAM from 54 to 22 GB; SASRec bf16 mixed precision 27 -> 13 ms per batch.
Trained on all rows instead of 1.5-17% samples: Recall@10 Two-Tower 0.70 -> 0.83 and Matrix Factorization 0.42 -> 0.57; against the older 60-day models, MF +51%, Two-Tower +30% and SASRec +10%.
31 automated tests confirmed the new loaders give the same results as the old ones.
End-to-end recommendation platform
5 models
Five models: Matrix Factorization, Two-Tower, SASRec (transformer), content-based and collaborative.
11 carousels for every user: Trending, New Release, Popular in Your Region, Because You Watched, People Also Watched, Hidden Gems, plus 3 scenario carousels: Onboarding Picks, Welcome Back and Continue Series.
Language- and region-aware ranking blends model score, carousel signal, language affinity (70% long-term / 30% recent, 30-day half-life) and genre affinity.
The AI team owns the models, scenario rules and batch data contract; the backend team owns the serving API.
Technical stack
PyTorch
CUDA
bf16/AMP
Two-Tower
Matrix Factorization
SASRec
collaborative filtering
content filtering
cold start
FAISS
Qdrant
Valkey
RAG
LLMs
Spark
DuckDB
Redshift
AWS S3
Parquet
FastAPI
Kubernetes/EKS
Git
tmux
Updates
A lightweight record of what I am working on, exploring, and planning next.
Now
exploring LLMs for recommendation systems, heavily reading netflix blogs.
my curiosity for alignment research is increasing day by day, planning a paper for iclr, hopefully, i will release the paper on arXiv soon.
Recent notes
Sponsorship from Soket AI
Happy, glad and grateful that Soket AI is sponsoring my travel to attend EMNLP 2026 conference at Budapest, Hungary.
EMNLP 2026 Main Conference Acceptance (15% acceptance rate)
TSS paper got accepted to EMNLP 2026, main conference, looking forward to attend, at Budapest, Hungary.
ai research enginner @ logituit
I have joined logituit, new place, new people, I hope everything goes well.
Research Interests
My research focuses on developing data-efficient, multilingual, and reliable language models. I am particularly interested in how limited data, computation, and human feedback can be used more effectively when training, adapting, and evaluating AI systems.
Budget-aware training and data selection
Efficient allocation of annotation and training budgets across tasks, examples, and annotators, including the selection of high-value data for language-model adaptation.
Instruction tuning and multilingual transfer
Efficient adaptation of language models through instruction tuning and parameter-efficient methods, with an emphasis on transfer between high- and low-resource languages.
AI alignment and human feedback
Developing reliable and inclusive methods for aligning language models with diverse human preferences while using human feedback efficiently.
Evaluation, annotation, and data quality
Studying how annotation strategies, evaluator diversity, instance difficulty, and dataset quality influence model behaviour and evaluation reliability.
Retrieval-augmented generation and recommendation systems
Combining language models with retrieval, structured knowledge, user behaviour, and content representations to build grounded conversational and recommendation systems.
More broadly, I am interested in building AI systems that are efficient, multilingual, trustworthy, and responsive to the people and contexts in which they are used.
Doctoral Research
My doctoral research at IIT Gandhinagar studied budget-aware decision making for NLP: how to use limited annotation effort, training tokens, and examples more effectively. The broader motivation is that better performance does not always come from simply collecting more data or training for longer; it also depends on deciding where the available resources should be spent.
Annotation: I studied the trade-off between collecting more labels for the same example and labeling a larger number of examples. Using a controlled multi-annotator simulation framework, I examined how annotation depth, disagreement, and instance difficulty affect model performance under a fixed annotation budget. The results show that collecting multiple labels is not always beneficial; its value depends on which examples receive additional annotations and how difficult or ambiguous those examples are. This work appeared in EMNLP 2023.
Training: I studied how a fixed token budget should be distributed across different task types during instruction tuning. Instead of relying on uniform or dataset-size-based sampling, I developed ADAPT, a validation-driven method that learns task proportions during training. ADAPT treats task allocation as a dynamic decision: it uses validation feedback to shift more of the available training budget toward tasks that are useful for downstream generalization.
Selection: I studied how to identify instruction-tuning examples that provide a meaningful instruction-following signal before fine-tuning. I developed Task-Specificity Score (TSS), which measures how strongly an output depends on the given instruction, conditioned on the input. Its extension, TSS++, combines instruction specificity with harder counterfactual instructions and data-quality signals. This allows models to train on smaller but more useful subsets of instruction data.
Together, these projects show that annotation, training, and data selection should be treated as allocation problems rather than simple scaling problems. My thesis develops methods for making these decisions more systematically under realistic resource constraints.
Honorable Mention: Understanding the Model-Hub Ecosystem
Alongside my thesis, I also worked on understanding how machine-learning models are shared, documented, and adopted in public model repositories. In Model Hubs and Beyond, we studied model popularity, performance, and documentation practices on Hugging Face. The work examined around 500 sentiment-analysis models and more than 80,000 human annotations, showing that model popularity is not determined by performance alone and that documentation quality, visibility, and platform-level factors shape which models receive attention and reuse. This project broadened my research from efficient model training to the wider infrastructure and social processes through which models are communicated and adopted.
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2020, pp. 539–540.
DOI
Teaching
My teaching experience spans data-centric computing, deep learning, natural language processing, and database systems. I have supported large student cohorts through lectures, tutorials, assignments, evaluations, project mentoring, and doubt-solving sessions.
Graduate Teaching Fellow — Data-Centric Computing
Served as a Graduate Teaching Fellow for Data-Centric Computing, a foundational course introducing students to computational thinking through data. I supported topics such as data representation, programming fundamentals, data processing, visualization, basic statistical reasoning, and problem-solving with real datasets. My role included conducting tutorials, assisting with assignments and assessments, clarifying programming concepts, and helping students connect computational methods with practical data-driven applications.
Graduate Teaching Fellow — Deep Learning
Served as a Graduate Teaching Fellow for a Deep Learning course with approximately 300 students. Supported the teaching of neural networks, optimization, convolutional networks, sequence models, attention, transformers, and modern language models. I contributed to tutorials, programming assignments, evaluation, project guidance, and student mentoring, with an emphasis on connecting mathematical foundations to practical implementation using modern deep learning frameworks.
Teaching Assistant — Natural Language Processing
Assisted with courses covering language modeling, text classification, sequence labeling, embeddings, attention, transformers, multilingual NLP, and evaluation. Guided students through programming assignments and projects involving real-world datasets and transformer-based models.
Teaching Assistant — Database Management Systems
Supported instruction in relational modeling, SQL, normalization, indexing, query processing, transactions, and database design. Conducted tutorials and helped students connect database concepts with practical software and data-system development.
Teaching Approach
I aim to make technical concepts accessible without oversimplifying them. My teaching combines conceptual clarity, mathematical intuition, implementation, and real-world examples, while encouraging students to analyze failures, question assumptions, and build reliable systems.