Chris Toukmaji

COMPUTER SCIENTIST

Chris Toukmaji

Machine Learning Intern @ Numerade Labs

Previously: NASA, Capital One, SapientX, UC Santa Cruz

I'm a graduate Computer Science student at UC Irvine working within the intersection of Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing. I was previously at UC Santa Cruz, where I completed my thesis on transfer learning for unseen low-resource language adaptation in monolingual LLMs, and was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Jeffrey Flanigan.

My research interests include: (1) Interpretability, Explainability, and Robustness of large transformer-based language models, (2) Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning, and (3) Efficient NLP. More specifically, my research interests aim to answer the following questions:

How can we efficiently adapt LLMs to out-of-domain and low-resource data distributions without restricting the hypothesis space?
How can we use NLP to {explain, improve} RL and vice versa?

In addition to researching at UC Irvine, I am a Machine Learning Intern at Numerade Labs where I am working on program synthesis in multimodal LLMs.

I've previously worked on:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM Agents at NASA
Fraud Detection at Capital One
Language Classification and Conversational AI at SapientX

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

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

News:

2024-04-01: Joined UCI NLP where I will be working on LLMs and Deep Reinforcement Learning.
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. See you soon CMU!
2022-06-13: First day at Capital One! Excited to work on interesting problems and explore San Francisco