CV
Siddharth Yayavaram
siddharth.yayavaram@gmail.com
+91 95133 61600
Pittsburgh, PA, US
Summary
MS NLP @ CMU | Gold Medalist @ BITS Pilani
Education
- Master of Science in NLP/ML, Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science2026-12Carnegie Mellon UniversityGPA:Courses: Advanced Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning (PhD), Machine Learning
- B.E. in Computer Science2025-07Birla Institute of Technology and Science, PilaniGPA: 9.97/10
Work Experience
- Research Intern (Undergraduate Thesis), NeuLab2024-05 - 2025-03Carnegie Mellon UniversityDeveloped a novel metric to quantify cultural relevance of real and generated images, and built an efficient large-scale (6 million entities) text-disambiguation image retrieval system using FAISS, surpassing SOTA LVLMs on the FOCI benchmark. Augmented LLMs with retrieved cultural context and Chain-of-thought prompting to compute relevance across cultural proxies, achieving +28% F1 on a challenging hand-curated validation set. Achieved Pearson r > 0.65 vs human annotations on a dataset comprising universal concepts. Accepted @ ICCV-W & currently under review @ (ACL Rolling Review).
- Research Intern, SpeechLab2024-03 - 2024-09Nanyang Technological UniversityFine-tuned LLaMA-3.1-8B with LoRA on the DAIC-WOZ dataset for text-based depression detection, achieving a +7.1% F1 improvement over prior work. Designed a PHQ-8–guided prompting strategy, enhancing both accuracy & interpretability.
- Summer Intern2023-05 - 2023-08Amazon, Applied ScienceDesigned outlier detection metrics and regression models for shipping-cost anomalies, built a Django REST API over UPS data to compute benchmark costs, and implemented BERT-based NER to extract product information for KB construction.
- Research Assistant2023-07 - 2025-05BITS PilaniEngaged in 4 Research Projects in Machine Learning–based Systems: BERT-based Idiom Detection, Interpretable SER, Malware Detection, In-Context-Learning with Information Retrieval.
Skills
Programming & OS
- Python
- C/C++
- Java
- SQL
- Linux
- High Performance Computing Clusters (HPC)
Libraries and Frameworks
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- Numpy
- Pandas
- Scikit-Learn
- HuggingFace
- Matplotlib
- spaCy
ML
- Natural Language Processing
- Diffusion Models
- Information Retrieval
- Computer Vision
- Multimodal ML
- GNNs
Publications
- CAIRE: Cultural Attribution of Images by Retrieval-Augmented Evaluation2025ICCV'25
- Critical Evaluation of Generative Models and their impact on Society2025ICCV'25
- BERT-based Idiom Identification using Language Translation and Word Cohesion2024LREC-COLING'24
- Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies2024LREC-COLING
- Interpretable Feature Optimization for Sadness Recognition in Speech Emotion Analysis2024IEEE IS'24
Languages
- EnglishNative speaker