Varun Yerram

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Hello! I am Varun, an incoming PhD student at New York University's Center for Data Science, advised by Prof. Eunsol Choi and Prof. He He.

I spent two years at Google DeepMind, India as a pre-doctoral researcher working on making LLMs better and faster. I was fortunate to work with brilliant researchers in the Machine Learning and Optimizations team led by Dr. Prateek Jain. During my time there, I worked on extracting unsupervised feedback from text to improve LLMs at various tasks with Time-Reversed Models, advised by Dr. Karthikeyan Shanmugam and Dr. Arun Suggala. In addition, I have worked on optimizing the attention layers for million-context models to enable efficient inference. I also developed methods to accelerate the FFN and SoftMax layers under the guidance of Dr. Praneeth Netrapalli.

Before that, I collaborated with Prof. Vivek Gupta on supplementing LLMs with knowledge graphs and testing the reasoning abilities of Visual LLMs. I also spent a summer at Amazon Science, modeling customer demographics through their behavioral history.

I developed my interests in Machine learning and its applications during my undergrad at IIT Guwahati, where I participated in many hackathons and challenges. Along with numerous kaggle wins, my team also placed second in Amazon Machine learning challenge 2021.




News and Updates

2025

  • August
    Starting my PhD at New York University!
  • Apr
    Attending ICLR 2025 in Singapore! See you there!

2024

2023

  • July
    Joining Machine learning optimizations team at Google Research, India!

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