About Me
I am currently woking with Dr Amit Deshpande as a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India on alignment and preference learning. I completed my B.Tech from IIT Madras (CSE) in July 2024, working in the Theory Group under Prof. Jayalal Sarma on complexity theory, more specifically Boolean function complexity. I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science and more recently, have been exploring problems in theoretical machine learning.
Research
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The Role of Preference Data and Unembeddings in the Convergence Rate of DPO
Gayathri Chandran*, Sai Soumya Nalli*, Shruthi Gorantla, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis
Poster at NeurIPS 2025 ARLET Workshop -
Sensitivity and Query Complexity under Uncertainty
Deepu Benson#, Balagopal Komarath#, Nikhil Mande#, Sai Soumya Nalli#, Jayalal Sarma#, Karteek Sreenivasiah#
MFCS 2025 Find slides here
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Hazard-free Decision Trees
Deepu Benson#, Balagopal Komarath#, Sai Soumya Nalli#, Jayalal Sarma#
Technical Report (earlier version of the above) -
Outlier-Aware Preference Optimization for Large Language Models
Pragya Srivastava, Sai Soumya Nalli, Amit Deshpande, Amit Sharma
Posters at ICLR 2025 BiAlign and QUESTION Workshops
* Equal contribution # Authors listed in alphabetical order (common practice in theoretical computer science)
News
- Presented our work at the MFCS conference held at University of Warsaw on August 25th, 2025. Had a great time being hosted as a research visitor by Dr Kunal Dutta!
- Gave a T-Meet talk in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras on August 12th, 2025 based on our paper "Sensitivity and Query Complexity under Uncertainty".
- Honored to be a joint-awardee of Prof C Sivaram Murthy Best B.Tech Project Award for best BTech Project from the CSE department during Convocation'24
- Joined Microsoft Research India as Research Fellow in July 2024
Academic Background
- B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Madras — Graduated July 2024