CSE IIT Bombay's RISC 2025 | Robust Customization of Large Language Models by Dr. Natarajan

#RISC2025 #cseiitbombay #LLMs Robust Customization of Large Language Models by Dr. Nagarajan Natarajan https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~risc/2025/ Pretrained large language models are increasingly achieving impressive zero-shot accuracies on challenging benchmarks. At the same time, customizing these models to perform well in specific settings is still crucial, e.g. fine-tuning models on private codebases or aligning models to application-specific requirements. In this talk, I’ll present an overview of the area of customizing LLMs that spans prompt engineering, fine-tuning, as well as post-training alignment. In particular, I’ll cover some of our recent ML work on training and aligning models to promote out-of-distribution generalization and robustness to noise in the training data. About the Speaker: "I am a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India. Over the last several years at MSR India, I’ve worked on a broad slate of machine learning problems at the intersection of AI and software engineering, AI and systems, as well as in learning theory and optimization. My current interests are largely shaped by the big challenges we face today as we increasingly deploy black-box Large Language Models in real systems like Co-pilots. I’ve collaborated with several researchers, scholars, and students who have shaped my thinking over the years. I owe a lot in particular to Prateek Jain, who mentored me at MSR India in the initial few years, to Prof. Ambuj Tewari who was instrumental in my formative years of research career, and to Prof. Inderjit Dhillon, my PhD advisor at the University of Texas at Austin."