NeurIPS 2026
I think black holes are the coolest thing ever.
Vatsal Baherwani
about me
Hey there, I'm Vatsal, a PhD student currently living in New York. I work with Pavel Izmailov and Andrew Gordon Wilson at NYU, and I am also grateful to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
This past summer I interned at Q Labs in San Francisco, where I researched scalable methods for synthetic data generation, specifically for language models. The summer before that, I was a visiting researcher at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, working with Raj Movva and Emma Pierson on practical applications for ML interpretability.
I previously graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, where I was fortunate to work with Pete Kyle (who first introduced me to academic research), Abhinav Shrivastava, Ashwinee Panda, and Tom Goldstein.
research
I am broadly interested in developing a scientific understanding of deep learning; some specific topics I have been exploring recently are emergent capabilities in language models, applying AI for scientific discovery, and generating synthetic data for pretraining.
selected publications
NeurIPS 2025
Dense Backpropagation Improves Training for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
more about me
- I used to write daily blog posts, although I don't as often anymore because I am trying to transition into running a social media vlogging page instead.
- I love food. If you can recommend a good restaurant in NYC, please contact me. I will gladly return the favor.
- Recently, I have been learning to sing and dance (specifically Bollywood dance). If you know of any fun dance classes/events in NYC let me know!
- I really enjoy reading about human nature, the brain, and consciousness. Here's what my bookshelf looks like.
- I want to travel as much of the world as possible in my lifetime. So far I've only been to a handful of countries.