ML Practitioner and Musician

Hi! I'm Siddharth Verma, a Research Engineer at Google Deepmind working on Gemini. Previously, I was a Research Engineer at Character working on LLM pretraining. I also was AI resident at Facebook AI Research working on scaling multimodal learning and improving reasoning capabilities of LLMs. I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Music from UC Berkeley where I worked with Prof. Sergey Levine on Reinforcement Learning and its applications to Natural Language Processing.

My expertise lies in Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement Learning. I have trained SoTA LLMs and deployed them to production serving millions of users. I have also conducted extensive ML research in both academic and industrial settings, resulting in multiple published papers in venues such as NeurIPS and ACL.

When I'm not training models or performing research, you can catch me practicing the piano, playing table tennis or tweaking my Emacs config.

Experience
Filters:
💼 GDM Research Engineer
Google Deepmind
🗓️ Aug 2024 to Current
📍 Cambridge MA
💼 Research Engineer
Character.ai
🗓️ Dec 2023 to Aug 2024
📍 New York NY
🧐 Using RL and Synthetic Data to Teach Chatbots to Avoid Certain Topics
Suppressing Pink Elephants with Direct Principle Feedback
🗓️ Feb 2024
😃 Contributor
🌐 ACL
🔗 ArXiv
🥂 Reviewer for EMNLP 2023
Peer review paper submissions
🗓️ Dec 2023
💼 Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Square
🗓️ Sep 2022 to Dec 2023
📍 Boston MA
🥂 Reviewer for ACL 2023
Peer review paper submissions
🗓️ Jul 2023
🧐 Investigating Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
OPT-R: Enhacing Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
🗓️ May 2023
😃 Contributor
🌐 ACL Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations workshop
🔗 ArXiv
🧐 Empirical investigation of masking strategies and rates in Vision-Language Pretraining
Uniform Masking Prevails in Vision-Language Pretraining
🗓️ Dec 2022
😃 First Author
🔗 ArXiv
🥂 Reviewer for EMNLP 2022
Peer review paper submissions
🗓️ Dec 2022
🧐 Investigating Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
ALERT: Adapting Language Models to Reasoning Tasks
🗓️ Oct 2022
😃 Contributor
🌐 ACL
🔗 ArXiv
💼 AI Resident
Meta (Facebook)
🗓️ Aug 2021 to Sep 2022
📍 Seattle WA
🥂 Reviewer for SIGIR 2022
Peer review paper submissions
🗓️ May 2022
🧐 Reinforcement Learning based Chatbots using Large Language Models
CHAI: A Chatbot AI for Task-oriented Dialog with Offline Reinforcement Learning
🗓️ Apr 2022
😃 First Author
🌐 NAACL
🔗 ArXiv
🔗 Webpage
🔗 Code
💼 Machine Learning Intern
Apple
🗓️ Jun 2021 to Aug 2021
📍 Seattle WA
🧐 Reinforcement Learning based Chatbots using Large Language Models
CHAI: A Chatbot AI for Task-oriented Dialog with Offline Reinforcement Learning
🗓️ Jul 2021
😃 First Author
🌐 ICLR NeuCAIR workshop
🔗 ArXiv
🔗 Webpage
🔗 Code
💼 Undergraduate Researcher at Robotic AI and Learning Lab
Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab
🗓️ Jan 2019 to May 2021
📍 Berkeley CA
💼 Teaching Assistant, Deep Learning and Neural Networks
UC Berkeley EECS
🗓️ Jan 2021 to May 2021
📍 Berkeley CA
🎓 UC Berkeley
BA Computer Science & Music
🗓️ Aug 2017 to May 2021
📜 3.965
🥂 High Distinction
Graduated with High Distinction. Equivalent to magna cum laude.
🗓️ May 2021
🥂 Phi Beta Kappa
Honor society for top graduates in college of L&S.
🗓️ Jan 2021
🧐 Reset-free robotic skill learning via Adversarial RL
Continual Learning of Control Primitives: Skill Discovery via Reset-Games
🗓️ Nov 2020
😃 CoFirst Author
🌐 NeurIPS
🔗 ArXiv
🔗 Code
🥂 EECS Honors
Awarded to the top students in EECS/CS who perform research.
🗓️ Jan 2020
🥂 Dean's List
Awarded semesterly to the top 10% of undergraduates.
🗓️ Jan 2019
🥂 Upsilon Pi Epsilon
Computer Science Honor Society. Was on the board of directors.
🗓️ Jan 2019
🎓 The International School Bangalore
International Baccalaureate Diploma
🗓️ Aug 2015 to May 2017
📜 48.0