Desh Raj

UT Austin campus

Extremely excited to announce that I will be joining
@utaustin.bsky.social Computer Science in August 2025 as an Assistant Professor! 🎉

Congrats to UT Austin on securing an incredible human!

Breaking News: Johns Hopkins University, a leader in scientific research, said it would eliminate more than 2,000 workers because of federal budget cuts.

Johns Hopkins is the largest private employer in Maryland.

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F.

18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it.

We made this website to tell our story:
18f.org

The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled Federal scientists warn that Americans could feel the effects of the new administration's devastating cuts for decades to come

For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally—and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally-funded research. Now all that's being dismantled. 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/21/1...

Insightful post by Kyunghyun Cho on the job prospects of PhD students finishing right now. AI has seen so rapid change that the world isn't the same it used to be when they started their studies.

kyunghyuncho.me/i-sensed-anx...

Entropy is one of those formulas that many of us learn, swallow whole, and even use regularly without really understanding.

(E.g., where does that “log” come from? Are there other possible formulas?)

Yet there's an intuitive & almost inevitable way to arrive at this expression.

Inventors of flow matching have released a comprehensive guide going over the math & code of flow matching!

Also covers variants like non-Euclidean & discrete flow matching.

A PyTorch library is also released with this guide!

This looks like a very good read! 🔥

arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2412.06264

🚨I too am on the job market‼️🤯

I'm searching for faculty positions/postdocs in multilingual/multicultural NLP, vision+language models, and eval for genAI!

I'll be at #NeurIPS2024 presenting our work on meta-evaluation for text-to-image faithfulness! Let's chat there!

Papers in🧵, see more: saxon.me

🚨 I am on the faculty job market this year 🚨
I will be presenting at #NeurIPS2024 and am happy to chat in-person or digitally!

I work on developing AI agents that can collaborate and communicate robustly with us and each other.

More at: esteng.github.io and in thread below

🧵👇

Congratulations!

This is my first official post at Bluesky with great news :)

We got the best paper award at IEEE SLT'24! This work elegantly and straightforwardly solves contextual biasing issues with dynamic vocabulary arxiv.org/abs/2405.13344. Congrats, Yui, Yosuke, Shakeel, and Yifan!
! I'm super happy!

YouTube video by Yoav Artzi Jonathan Berant (Tel Aviv University / Google) / Towards Robust Language Model Post-training

I am seriously behind uploading Learning Machines videos, but I did want to get @jonathanberant.bsky.social's out sooner than later. It's not only a great talk, it also gives a remarkably broad overview and contextualization, so it's an excellent way to ramp up on post-training
youtu.be/2AthqCX3h8U

CTCLoss gradient is incorrect · Issue #52241 · pytorch/pytorch 🐛 Bug Hi, While working on some CTC extensions, I noticed that torch's CTCLoss was computing incorrect gradient. At least when using CPU (I have not tested on GPU yet). I observed this problem on b...

I just learned that Torch ctc_loss calculates the wrong gradient (but when there was log_softmax before, it does not matter).

For the grad ctc_loss w.r.t. log_probs, it calculates exp(log_probs) - y, but correct would be -y. Some workaround: github.com/pytorch/pyto...

PS: First Bluesky post.

Can someone recommend good resources for deep dive into RLHF methods? I have a basic understanding mostly from blogs and mainstream papers (like InstructGPT), but would like to gain more insights + understand current research. Thanks in advance!

I've started putting together a starter pack with people working on Speech Technology and Speech Science: go.bsky.app/BQ7mbkA

(Self-)nominations welcome!

Does everyone in your community agree on some folk knowledge that isn’t published anywhere? Put it in a paper! It’s a pretty valuable contribution

Research Scientist Intern, AI Research - Speech & Audio (PhD) Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

Our GenAI-Speech team at Meta is hiring RS interns for summer 2025 to work on speech, LLMs, dialog generation, and other exciting stuff! Check out the job posting here: www.metacareers.com/jobs/3841154...

CLSP Join the conversation

Putting together a JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing starter pack!

Please reply or DM me if you're doing research at CLSP and would like to be added - I'm still trying to find out which of us are on here so far.

go.bsky.app/JtWKca2

I am glad you found them useful!

Can you add me too? Thanks!

Hi, I'm Desh! I work on speech and LLMs at Meta NY (but you may also know me from my H1B rant going viral).

Thanks for this super useful starter kit. Can you add me as well?