news

Nov. 2026 :speaking_head: Invited speaker at INFORMS 2026
Oct. 2026 ✈️ Will be attending COLM 2026 in San Francisco 🌉
Sep. 2026 :speaking_head: Invited lectures at The New Turing Institute’s GStar Bootcamp
Jul. 2026 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received the 2026-2027 Amazon - VT faculty research award :pray:
Jul. 2026 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received the NSF CISE Future Computing Research (Future CoRe) award :pray:
Jul. 2026 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received funding from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) :pray:
Jul. 2026 :page_facing_up: Papers to appear at COLM 2026: EvoSkill (automated skill discovery) and \(\pi^2\) (a framework for curating reasoning data) :tada:
Jun. 2026 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received the Gemini Academic Program award :pray:
Apr. 2026 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at ICML 2026: LLM self-evolution generalization gap :tada:
Apr. 2026 ✈️ Attended ICLR 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 🇧🇷
Mar. 2026 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received the College of Engineering Major Grants Initiative (MGI) Scaling Scholarship :pray:
Feb. 2026 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received a research gift award from Sentient Labs :pray:
Jan. 2026 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at ICLR 2026: SealQA (a challenge benchmark for search agents) :tada:
Oct. 2025 :speaking_head: Lightning talk at the Amazon - VT AI Workshop
Oct. 2025 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received the 2025-2026 Amazon - VT faculty research award :pray:
Oct. 2025 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received faculty research awards from Google DeepMind and Google Research :pray:
Aug. 2025 :speaking_head: Gave two invited lectures at The New Turing Institute’s GStar Bootcamp
Aug. 2025 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at EMNLP 2025: alignment transfer :tada:
Aug. 2025 :speaking_head: Featured invited speaker at the Open AGI Symposium at UC Berkeley
Jun. 2025 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at TMLR 2025: large-scale model merging :tada:
Jun. 2025 :speaking_head: Invited lecture at The New Turing Institute
Apr. 2025 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received the New Faculty Mentoring Grant from VT :pray:
Nov. 2024 :chart_with_upwards_trend: Received a research gift award from Adobe :pray:
Nov. 2024 ✈️ Attended EMNLP 2024 in Miami, Florida 🌴
Nov. 2024 :speaking_head: Invited talk at Qualcomm Seminar Series
Oct. 2024 :speaking_head: Invited talk at Mila / McGill NLP seminar
Sep. 2024 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at EMNLP 2024: FLAMe (foundational auto-raters) :tada:
Aug. 2024 :briefcase: Started my professorship at Virginia Tech
May. 2024 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at ACL 2024 Findings: FreshLLMs (LLM freshness) :tada:
Feb. 2024 :briefcase: I am now serving as an Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
Jan. 2024 :page_facing_up: Paper to appear at ICLR 2024: Flan-MoE (instruction tuning + Mixture-of-Experts) :tada:
Nov. 2023 :speaking_head: Invited talk at Graph Neural Networks Reading Group, Google
Aug. 2023 :briefcase: Joined Google DeepMind in Mountain View, CA as a Research Scientist
Jul. 2023 :mortar_board: Successfully defended my PhD thesis! :tada: :champagne: