vijay viswanathan

(he/him)

PhD student, software engineer

                                  CV

Hi!

I'm a PhD candidate at the Language Technologies Institute in CMU's School of Computer Science, advised by Sherry Tongshuang Wu and Graham Neubig.

I'm interested in developing methods for anyone to build and correct language models, and I'm mostly focused on using synthetic data and reward models to achieve this (check out our tutorial at ACL 2025 to learn more about this exciting area!).

Some of the research directions I've helped develop are rubric-based RL (one of the earliest works in this emerging space), agentic data generation (Prompt2Model), and retrieval-augmented data generation (DataTune).

Previously I was supported by an NEC Student Research Fellowship. I'm grateful to have also worked closely with Pengfei Liu during my Master's and Eric Nyberg during undergrad.

Publications

Academic Service

  • Reviewer for every cycle of ACL Rolling Review
  • Top Reviewer for NeurIPS 2025 (top 8%)
  • Member of CMU LTI DEI Committee (2022-2023).
  • Co-organizer of the 2023 CMU LTI Seminar on Large Language Models
  • Teaching Assistant for 11-737: Multilingual NLP (Spring 2022)
  • Student Volunteer for LTI Faculty Hiring Committee (Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023). (Chaired the student committee in Spring 2022)

Consulting

I occasionally get emails from founders or teams in industry looking to chat about ideas. I would love to help, but unfortunately do not have the bandwidth to participate in all such discussions. Accordingly, I'm now offering consulting at a rate of $300/hour. Feel free to book an initial consultation to see if this could be a good fit.

Expertise: synthetic data, large language models, dataset curation and annotation, clustering/exploratory analysis of documents