hello, i'm
Vedant Rathi
currently pursuing bachelor's in computer science at UIUC
passionate about deep learning, especially interpretability, post-training, and inference for LLMs.
Research
selected publications
Breaking Bad Tokens
Detoxifying LLMs using sparse autoencoders and interpretability-driven interventions. We decompose black-box models like GPT and Gemma to identify and suppress toxic features while preserving coherence.
EMNLP 2025
Teaching Reasoning to LLMs
Investigated inducing LLM reasoning without RL or distillation; contributed to a released human-authored chain-of-thought dataset for contest math, used for SFT.
ICML AI4Math 2025 Workshop
Interpretable Spam Detection
Meta-learner framework for email spam detection that combines ensemble ML and deep learning techniques. Evaluated on 50,000+ samples with strong zero-shot generalization.
Frontiers in AI 2025
Projects
things i've built
Tiny KV Cache
Embedded key-value store in C++20 with an append-only write-ahead log and on-disk snapshots. Implements thread-safe in-memory state via sharded hash maps with WAL replay for crash recovery.
- C++
- Threading
- File I/O
Mini Inference Engine
Load-balanced, multi-container inference serving system for running small language models with real-time token streaming over gRPC. Routes requests using load balancer with live metrics and manages Dockerized worker fleets.
- Docker
- gRPC
- Inference
Predictive Concept Decoders
Reproduction of Transluce AI's interpretability assistant. Trains an encoder to compress residual-stream activations into sparse concept bottlenecks, with a decoder that answers questions about model behavior.
- PyTorch
- DDP
- Interpretability
CycleGAN Style Transfer
From-scratch CycleGAN implementation for unpaired image-to-image translation. Converts photos to Monet-style paintings and back, trained for 5 epochs on P100s.
- PyTorch
- CycleGAN
- Computer Vision
LyricSearch
AI-powered lyrics platform that generates original verses with GPT-3.5 and checks authenticity against 480K+ real songs using RAG-style semantic search with FAISS.
- RAG
- FAISS
- Flask
Gmail MCP Server
Model Context Protocol server that lets Claude interact with Gmail via natural language. Supports drafting, sending, labeling, and managing threads through conversational commands.
- FastMCP
- Gmail API
Experience
where i've worked
ML Research Intern
Axiom
Worked on building multi-agent reasoning systems and improving RL post-training for formal theorem proving.
ML Engineer Intern
MathWorks
Engineered a MATLAB coding assistant with a slash-command interface + MCP tool servers, implementing structured tool-calls (e.g., codebase search, doc retrieval, run/verify) for reliable multi-step workflows.
Student Researcher
Nvidia Math Reasoning Team
Contributed to research on teaching reasoning capabilities to language models through minimal supervision approaches.
ML Engineer Intern
AviaryAI (YC S22)
Fine-tuned LLMs to steer voice-agent persona consistency and style; built OCR-driven pipelines to extract and structure insurance documents for automation.
Student Researcher
Crowd Dynamics Lab @ UIUC
Research on LLM safety and interpretability, focusing on methods to identify and mitigate harmful model behaviors.