Chris Toukmaji

I'm an AI Applied Scientist on the Foundation Models team at SAP.​​​

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I was previously a graduate student at UC Irvine. I researched RL for agentic multi-turn code reasoning and natural language planning for LLM code generation, where I was fortunate to be advised by

Dr. Sameer Singh. Before that, I was at UC Santa Cruz, where I researched transfer learning for unseen low-resource language adaptation in monolingual LLMs, and was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Jeffrey Flanigan. 

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My research interests center around cross-modal learning and adaptation in LLMs. More specifically, I aim to answer the following question:

• How can we effectively adapt LLMs to out-of-domain and low-resource data distributions without constraining their hypothesis space?​​​

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I've previously worked on: 

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM Agents at  NASA

• Fraud Detection at  Capital One                          

• Embeddings, program synthesis, and LLM infra at Numerade

• Language Classification and Conversational AI at  SapientX 

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In my free time, I enjoy working out, attending concerts, and

watching sports.

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Please feel to reach out if you would like to chat!

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News:

• 2025-07-07: First day as an AI Applied Scientist at SAP

• 2025-06-14: Graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from UC Irvine

• 2025-06-09: Paper accepted at ACL GEM 2025

• 2024-04-01: Joined UCI NLP where I will be working on LLMs for Code Generation

• 2024-02-06: Paper accepted at AAAI-MAKE 2024: AAAI Spring Symposium Series at Stanford

• 2023-10-19: First day as an ML Intern at Numerade Labs

• 2023-09-28: Started as a graduate student at UC Irvine

• 2023-06-20: First day as an AI Research Intern at NASA

• 2023-06-17: Graduated Cum Laude and Highest Honors with a B.S. in Computer Science and a Minor in Statistics from UC Santa Cruz

• 2022-10-29: Best Paper @ CMSAC '22 in the Student Methodology track

• 2022-10-04: Paper accepted at CMSAC '22

• 2022-06-13: First day at Capital One. Excited to work on interesting problems and explore San Francisco