Varun Gumma
PhD Student, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University.
Hey👋! I am Varun, a second-year PhD student in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, advised by Prof. Soujanya Poria. Previously, I was a Pre-Doctoral SCAI-Center Fellow at Microsoft Research India, where I was mentored by Dr. Kalika Bali and Dr. Sunayana Sitaram. Prior to that, I completed my M.Tech at IIT Madras, co-advised by Dr. Raj Dabre and Prof. Mitesh Khapra, and earlier earned my B.E. in Computer Science (with a Minor in Physics) from BITS Hyderabad.
Please feel free to reach out to me over email if you have any questions about my research, have suggestions or just want to chat, especially about Ph.D./MS opportunities and the applications cycle. (Just released a blogpost on it!)
news
| Jul 24, 2026 | 📜 Preprint of our new work, IDEAgent: Agentic Quality-Diversity Search for Research Idea Generation, is live! Code is available here. |
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| Jul 02, 2026 | 📜 UPDESH: Synthesizing Grounded Instruction Tuning Data for 13 Indic Languages has been accepted at ACL 2026! |
| Sep 26, 2025 | 📜 The first work of my Ph.D, OffTopicEval: When Large Language Models Enter the Wrong Chat, Almost Always!, has been accepted at ICLR 2026! |
| Sep 26, 2025 | 📜 Preprint of my final work at MSRI, UPDESH: Synthesizing Grounded Instruction Tuning Data for 13 Indic Languages, is live! |
| Aug 18, 2025 | ⏹️ Completed my stint at Microsoft Research India! Grateful to all collaborators! |
| Aug 11, 2025 | ▶️ Started my Ph.D at School of EEE @ Nanyang Technological University! |
| Apr 29, 2025 | 📜 Towards Inducing Document-Level Abilities in MNMT Systems has been accepted at NAACL 2025! |
| Nov 10, 2024 | ✈️ Attending EMNLP 2024 at Miami, Florida to present our work, Pariksha. |
| Oct 21, 2024 | 📜 The Report on Contamination of Multilingual Benchmarks has been accepted at EvalEval @ NEURIPS 2024. The preprint is live! |
| Oct 18, 2024 | 📜 Preprint of Health-Pariksha is online. Do check it out, and more models are on the way! Also, an updated version of Towards Inducing Document-Level Abilities in MNMT Systems is online, with an improved name, write up, evaluation set and framework. |
| Aug 10, 2024 | ✈️ Attending ACL 2024 at Bangkok, Thailand (my first ever conference 🎉). |
| Jul 31, 2023 | ↪️ Converted from Intern to SCAI Center Fellow at Microsoft Research India. |
| May 22, 2023 | ▶️ Started my Internship at Microsoft Research India. |