About Me

Hello, I’m Arnav Yayavaram, a first year Master’s in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

I recently graduated as the Institute Silver Medalist (Rank 2) from BITS Pilani where I majored in Computer Science and Engineering.

I work at the intersection of multimodal AI, language models, and culturally aware machine learning. For my undergraduate thesis, I collaborated with CMU alongside Professor Graham Neubig, Simran Khanuja, and Michael Saxon to build a system that enriches vision-language models with knowledge from a multilingual, multicultural database, improving their ability to evaluate images for cultural relevance. This project was accepted to CEGIS @ ICCV 2025 and EACL 2026 (Main Conference).

Earlier, I explored machine learning applications in mental health, including speech-based analysis, and developed post-training approaches for language models on various nuanced and human centric tasks.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss ideas, potential collaborations, or research opportunities.