Hi!
I'm a Senior Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, Mountain View, where I focus on Post-training (RL, SFT) for coding and agentic capabilities. I am a core contributor to the Gemini project since Gemini 1.0, most recently for Gemini 4 (Argon), Gemini 3.5 Flash, and 3.0 Pro. Previously, I've worked on training Gemini for Jules, an end-to-end software engineering agent.
I was a graduate student at the Language Technologies Department, Carnegie Mellon University, for the MIIS program. I was part of the MultiComp Lab, where I worked with Chaitanya Ahuja and Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency on multimodal gesture generation.
I interned at DeepMind for the summer (2022), working on code generation. I was previously a Research Engineer (on contract) at Google Research India, working with Dr. Partha Talukdar in the NLU Group. Here, I worked on entity-aware translation for educational content, and neural temporal parsing of queries.
Before this, I spent an amazing year at Microsoft Research India, and worked with Prof. Monojit Choudhury and Dr. Kalika Bali on various problems in low-resource language systems and probing NLI models.
I did my undergraduate thesis at Microsoft Research under Dr. Navin Goyal and Prof. Monojit Choudhury, on semantic parsing applied to the conversion of natural language to regular expressions and SQL. I graduated with a B.E. (Hons.) in Computer Science from BITS Pilani, Goa, India, in 2019.
Experience
-- Senior Research Engineer, Post-Training for Code.
-- Core Contributor to Gemini 4 (Argon), Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.0 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Gemini 1.0.
-- Co-created Gemini's unified agentic tool-calling framework for multi-step code RL, SFT distillation, and agentic evals, used to post-train every Gemini model since Gemini 3 and adopted by 20+ teams across Google.
-- Improved Gemini's tool-use generalization via RL and SFT: fewer tool-call hallucinations, better generalization to external agent harnesses, and stronger instruction following via reward shaping.
-- RL captain for a Flash-size Gemini training run; trained SFT checkpoints and built trace-filtering pipelines for better-behaved RL initializations.
-- Improved SWE agent performance through large-scale SFT distillation; post-trained the model behind Jules, and contributed to Gemini Code Assist.
-- Contributor to CodeGemma.
Research Assistant | Advisor: Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency, Mentor: Chaitanya Ahuja
-- Devised continual learning techniques for generative models. Focused on preventing catastrophic forgetting in multimodal gesture generation.
-- Work published at ICCV'23.
-- Trained and implemented large language models for code generation. (AlphaCode style models).
-- Explored multi-task training and reinforcement learning objectives for sampling and re-ranking.
-- Created a scalable entity-aware translation+transliteration pipeline to generate subtitles for English-medium college lecture videos (from NPTEL) for various Indian languages.
-- Developed neural temporal parsing models for multilingual queries using knowledge graph infused techniques.
-- Contributed to creating a challenge for Indian multilingual QA.
Research Intern | Managers: Dr. Kalika Bali, Prof. Monojit Choudhury
-- Probed large pretrained language models for NLI reasoning, by designing a taxonomy of reasoning capabilities, annotating an existing NLI dataset based on the capabilities, then evaluating the model performance on this new dataset.
-- Worked on a range of multilingual problems, such as quantitative analysis of language diversity in ACL, efficacy of code-mixing chatbots, measuring quality of crowdsourced speech data, among others.
-- Works published at ACL, CoNLL, CSCW, LREC, EMNLP Workshop, and ICON (see publications below).
Research Intern | Managers: Dr. Navin Goyal, Prof. Monojit Choudhury
-- Worked on semantic parsing and its applications to natural language to code. Particularly focused on natural language to regular expressions (NL2Regex), and to SQL queries.
Implemented and experimented with different neural architectures for NL2Regex, and conducted an error analysis. Subsequently, I also analyzed quality of various semantic parsing datasets
using a range of metrics and indicators.
-- Research carried out also contributed to my undergraduate thesis.
Software Engineering Intern | Manager: Mr. Gokulan Jayaram
-- Created voice interface application for truck drivers. Used pocketsphinx-android from CMUSphinx to power voice recognition.
Customized to recognize key commands in English, Hindi, and Indian-English.
-- Created capabilities like an in-built support system, location and route support, and verbal data entry.
-- Presented prototype to I-Loads administration (CEO,CFO,CTO) and tech team.
Publications
Gemini Team Google:..., , ...
Arxiv 2024
website | pdf | abstract
Coverage/Media Mentions: Google Blog | VentureBeat | CNET
Gemini Team Google:..., , ..., Jeffrey Dean, Oriol Vinyals
Arxiv 2023
website | pdf | abstract
Coverage/Media Mentions: New York Times | BBC | Tech Crunch | Wired Magazine
CodeGemma Team: Heri Zhao, Jeffrey Hui, Joshua Howland, Nam Nguyen, Siqi Zuo, Andrea Hu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Jingyue Shen, Joe Kelley, Kshitij Bansal, Luke Vilnis, Mateo Wirth, Paul Michel, Peter Choy, , Ravin Kumar, Sarmad Hashmi, Shubham Agrawal, Zhitao Gong, Jane Fine, Tris Warkentin, Ale Jakse Hartman, Bin Ni, Kathy Korevec, Kelly Schaefer, Scott Huffman
Arxiv 2024
website | pdf | abstract
*, Sebastin Santy*, Amar Budhiraja*, Kalika Bali, Monojit Choudhury
Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2020
website | pdf | abstract
Coverage/Media Mentions: FTC Commissioner Speech | NLP with Friends | Quartz | Ruder's Blog | LacunaFund | Underrated ML | NLP Newsletter | SIGTYP Newsletter
Basil Abraham, Danish Goel, Divya Siddarth, Kalika Bali, Manu Chopra, Monojit Choudhury, , Preethi Jyothi, Sunayana Sitaram and Vivek Seshadri (Alphabetically Ordered)
International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) 2020
Coverage/Media Mentions: Indian Express | Microsoft Stories
, Christain Barnes, Sebastin Santy, Simran Khanuja, Sanket Shah, Anirudh Srinivasan, Satwik Bhattamishra, Sunayana Sitaram, Monojit Choudhury and Kalika Bali
International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) 2019
pdf | abstract | slides
Honors and Awards
BITS Global 30 under 30, award for Research Leadership (2025)
announcement
Talks and Panels
The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World
Lee Language Lab at OntarioTech University, Remote
video
The Nuts and Bolts (and Nuances) of Foundation Models
Centre for Democracy and Technology Panel, Remote
video |
description
NLP for the Long Tail
Google Research, Remote
The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity in the NLP World
NLP with Friends, Remote
video |
description
Reviewing
Sub-Reviewer LREC 2020, ACL 2020, ICON 2019