vijay viswanathan

(he/him)

PhD student, software engineer

Hi!

I'm a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute in CMU's School of Computer Science, advised by Sherry Tongshuang Wu and Graham Neubig. I'm interested in developing interfaces for anyone to build and correct NLP models ("alignment") and I'm mostly interested in using synthetic data to achieve this. Previously I was supported by an NEC Student Research Fellowship. I'm grateful to have also worked closely with Pengfei Liu during my Master's and Eric Nyberg during undergrad.

Publications

Checklists Are Better Than Reward Models For Aligning Language Models (code, dataset "WildChecklists", model "Qwen.2.5-8B-Instruct + RLCF", bibtex)
Vijay Viswanathan,, Yanchao Sun, Shuang Ma, Xiang Kong, Meng Cao, Graham Neubig, Tongshuang Wu
NeurIPS 2025 (spotlight: top 3.5% of submissions)
Self-Guide: Better Task-Specific Instruction Following via Self-Synthetic Finetuning (code, bibtex)
Chenyang Zhao*, Xueying Jia*, Vijay Viswanathan, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig
COLM 2024
Training Task Experts through Retrieval Based Distillation (code, bibtex)
Jiaxin Ge*, Xueying Jia*, Vijay Viswanathan, Hongyin Luo, Graham Neubig
arXiv (2024)
Synthetic Multimodal Question Generation (bibtex)
Ian Wu*, Sravan Jayanthi *, Vijay Viswanathan, Simon Rosenberg, Sina Pakazad, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig
EMNLP Findings 2024
Better Synthetic Data by Retrieving and Transforming Existing Datasets (code, bibtex)
Saumya Gandhi*, Ritu Gala*, Vijay Viswanathan, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig
ACL Findings 2024
Prompt2Model: Generating Deployable Models from Natural Language Instructions (video, code, bibtex)
Vijay Viswanathan*, Chenyang Zhao*, Amanda Bertsch, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig
EMNLP 2023 Demo Track
Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering (code, bibtex)
Vijay Viswanathan, Kiril Gashteovski, Carolin Lawrence, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2024)
DataFinder: Scientific Dataset Recommendation from Natural Language Descriptions (code, bibtex)
Vijay Viswanathan, Luyu Gao, Tongshuang Wu, Pengfei Liu, Graham Neubig
ACL 2023
A Dataset for N-ary Relation Extraction of Drug Combinations (video, code, bibtex)
Aryeh Tiktinsky*, Vijay Viswanathan*, Danna Niezni, Dana Meron Azagury, Yosi Shamay, Hillel Taub-Tabib, Tom Hope, Yoav Goldberg
NAACL 2022 (oral)
DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Intervention (demo, code, bibtex)
Yang Xiao, Jinlan Fu, Weizhe Yuan, Vijay Viswanathan, Zhoumianze Liu, Yixin Liu, Graham Neubig, Pengfei Liu
ACL 2022 Demo Track. [Outstanding Demo Paper]
Rethinking End-to-End Evaluation of Decomposable Tasks: A Case Study on Spoken Language Understanding (code, bibtex)
Siddhant Arora*, Alissa Ostapenko*, Vijay Viswanathan*, Siddharth Dalmia*, Florian Metze, Shinji Watanabe, Alan W Black
Interspeech 2021
CitationIE: Leveraging the Citation Graph for Scientific Information Extraction (video, code, bibtex)
Vijay Viswanathan, Graham Neubig, Pengfei Liu
ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (oral)

Academic Service

Reviewer for every cycle of ACL Rolling Review
Top Reviewer for NeurIPS 2025 (top 8%)
Member of CMU LTI DEI Committee (2022-2023).
Co-organizer of the 2023 CMU LTI Seminar on Large Language Models
Teaching Assistant for 11-737: Multilingual NLP (Spring 2022)
Student Volunteer for LTI Faculty Hiring Committee (Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023). (Chaired the student committee in Spring 2022)

Consulting

I occasionally get emails from founders or teams in industry looking to chat about ideas. I would love to help, but unfortunately do not have the bandwidth to participate in all such discussions. Accordingly, I'm now offering consulting at a rate of $300/hour. Feel free to book an initial consultation to see if this could be a good fit.

Expertise: synthetic data, large language models, dataset curation and annotation, clustering/exploratory analysis of documents