Alok Shah

I'm a student at University of Pennsylvania where I study Computer Science (B.S.E), Mathematics (B.A.), and Electrical Engineering (M.S.E) with a focus on Optimization and Control.

Outside of class I lead MLR@Penn, the undergraduate AI and ML research organization and community at Penn and serve on the Student Advisory Board for the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative.

In my free time, I enjoy history and geography trivia, traveling, trying new food trucks and restaurants around Philly, and burning off those calories by playing pickup soccer.

I'm open to collaborations or talking about anything related to ML and research -- I especially enjoy mentoring younger students interested in getting involved in the field!

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Research

I'm broadly interested in playing simple tricks on models to improve empirical and theoretical bounds alike on performance across modalities. Currently, I'm developing methods to induce more robust, explainable, and generalizable reasoning capabilities in generative models while ensuring their responsible use in practice.

Explored novel meta-attention mechanism using meta-tokens to enhance model reasoning and interpretability in language models.

Developed in-context optimization method leveraging weak learners to improve reasoning in strong large language models without additional finetuning

Investigated the efficacy of using large language models as surrogate reward functions for reinforcement learning in the ALFWorld environment.