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:
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How can we efficiently adapt LLMs to out-of-domain and low-resource data distributions without restricting the hypothesis space?
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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:
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Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM Agents at NASA
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Fraud Detection at Capital One
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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:
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2024-04-01: Joined UCI NLP where I will be working on LLMs and Deep Reinforcement Learning.
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2024-02-06: Paper accepted at AAAI-MAKE 2024: AAAI Spring Symposium Series at Stanford!
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2023-10-19: First day as an ML Intern at Numerade Labs!
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2023-09-28: Started as a graduate student at UC Irvine!
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2023-06-20: First day as an AI Research Intern at NASA!
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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!
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2022-10-29: Best Paper @ CMSAC '22 in the Student Methodology track!
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2022-10-04: Paper accepted at CMSAC '22. See you soon CMU!
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2022-06-13: First day at Capital One! Excited to work on interesting problems and explore San Francisco