Vashisth Tiwari

Hello! I’m a first-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, advised by Prof. Emma Strubell and Prof. Zico Kolter. I completed my Masters at CMU and a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Rochester.

Summer 2025: Seattle — Google Research — Student Researcher with Dr. Giulia DeSalvo (synthetic data + RL).

My research focuses on making better and more efficient smaller models through improvements to both training and data. I’m particularly interested in distillation, synthetic data generation, and reinforcement learning for post-training.

I’ve had the pleasure of learning from and working with Prof. Beidi Chen (efficient inference), Lucio Dery and Clara Na (synthetic data).

Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat about research, potential collaborations, or just want to say hi.

Photography portfolio →

Outside of work, I love photography—check out my portfolio and Instagram. I spent much of my life playing badminton, including on the team at the University of Rochester, and now I'm playing tennis.

I love food and coffee, perhaps a bit too much. I'm always on the lookout for new spots—so if you have recommendations, send them my way :).