Josh Barua

Hey there! I'm a predoctoral researcher at UT Austin, advised by Kyle Mahowald. I recently graduated from UC Berkeley 🐻, where I was very fortunate to be advised by Alane Suhr as part of the Berkeley NLP Group. I have also spent great summers interning at CMU LTI, working with Graham Neubig, and the MIT Lincoln Lab.

Current local minima

Reasoning in LLMs

Recently, I've been exploring the underlying principles of reasoning in LLMs: to what extent it generalizes, how we can control it, and what the role of human-like reasoning is in model computation.

Steepest directions for gradient updates

Human–model collaboration & oversight

How can humans learn from, collaborate with, and oversee "superhuman" models? Can we design guardrails that better scale with model capabilities?

Science of language models

I am interested in understanding the structure of representations and the kinds of solutions neural networks learn. Can we find simple explanations in small models and controlled testbeds that reliably predict more complex phenomena?

In addition to research, I spent three fun semesters teaching the data structures & algos class (CS 61B) at Berkeley. In my free time, I enjoy climbing rocks, playing video games with my friends, and sending funny cat videos to Angela.

[Sep 2025] Spending the next year at UT Austin working with Kyle Mahowald 🤘

[Jul 2025] Our paper Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Languages was accepted to the ScalR Workshop at COLM! See you in Montréal 🇨🇦

[May 2025] I started my research internship at CMU LTI working with Graham Neubig!

[Sep 2024] Our paper Using Language Models to Disambiguate Lexical Choices in Translation was accepted to EMNLP 2024! See you in Miami 🌴

Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Languages
Josh Barua, Seun Eisape, Kayo Yin, Alane Suhr
ScalR @ COLM 2025
paper| code

Using Language Models to Disambiguate Lexical Choices in Translation
Josh Barua, Sanjay Subramanian, Kayo Yin, Alane Suhr
EMNLP 2024
paper| code

Improving Medical Visual Representations via Radiology Report Generation
Keegan Quigley, Miriam Cha, Josh Barua, Geeticka Chauhan, Seth Berkowitz, Steven Horng, Polina Golland
ArXiv 2023
paper