curriculum vitae

Member of Technical Staff (San Francisco, CA)

• Researching robustness of AI safety judges against CBRNE-related adversarial content.
• Running Hackaprompt, the world's largest red-teaming hackathon, overseeing user engagement and technical challenges.

Undergrad Researcher, CLIP Lab

Advisors: Prof. Rachel Rudinger & Prof. Jordan Boyd-Graber

• Validated robustness of LLM-generated MCQs for unintended artifacts to assess if questions are solvable without full context, providing a framework that improves the reliability of synthetic data for benchmark evaluation.
• Architected an adversarial benchmark to test VLM capabilities in detecting out-of-context (OOC) video-based misinformation on social media based on multimodal clues and user interactions.

Visiting Researcher, ACL2 Lab & NSF

Advisor: Prof. Kenny Zhu

• Designed AniVoice-cat, a dataset of 26,000+ annotated cat vocalizations from 250+ hours of video and identified 57 unique cat phones, establishing a foundational resource for computational research in non-human communication.
• Improved transcription pipeline using PANNs and HuBERT models to 96% accuracy with 93% top-5 accuracy in action recognition, setting a new state-of-the-art for automated animal vocalization analysis.

Researcher, FIRE Sustainability Analytics Lab

Advisor: Prof. Thanicha Ruangmas

• Developed Python pipeline for environmental impact assessments of U.S. emissions, enabling more efficient policy.
• Drafted a framework to guide evidence-based policymaking on climate restoration strategies.

Researcher, Reinforcement Learning at Brown Group

Advisor: Prof. Michael Littman

• Developed a custom RL environment that empowered non-technical users to programmatically solve complex tasks by defining reward functions and specifying agent behavior, reducing task setup time.
• Published and presented research at two top-tier workshops (AAAI, RLDM), demonstrating how human-readable interfaces enable fine-grained control during inference and improve AI-human interaction in robotics.

Preprints * — equal contribution

1. BenchMarker: An Education-Inspired Toolkit for Highlighting Flaws in Multiple-Choice Benchmarks.
   Nishant Balepur, Bhavya Rajasekaran, Jane Oh, Michael Xie, Atrey Desai, …, Jordan Boyd-Graber.
   (Under Review at ACL).
2. Emergence of Filler–Gap Mechanisms in Developmentally Constrained Language Models.
   Atrey Desai and Sathvik Nair.
   (Under Review at TLS, ACL).
3. Test-Time Reasoners Are Strategic Multiple-Choice Test-Takers.
   Nishant Balepur, Atrey Desai and Rachel Rudinger.
   arXiv:2510.07761 (Under Review at ACL Rolling Review).
4. A Preview of Computational Animal Linguistics.
   Atrey Desai, Tirza Panunto, Lindsay Pike, Theron S. Wang, Tuan M. Dang, Hridayesh Lekhak and Kenny Q. Zhu.
   (Under Review at Computational Linguistics).

Conference Publications

1. Language Models Generate Multiple-Choice Questions with Artifacts.
   Atrey Desai, Nishant Balepur and Rachel Rudinger.
   Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL), 2025.
2. Reinforcement Learning As End-User Trigger-Action Programming.
   Chace Hayhurst, Hyojae Park, Atrey Desai, Suheidy De Los Santos and Michael Littman.
   AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) IML Workshop, 2022.
   Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM), 2022.

Adaptor Grammars and Neural Networks for Feline Lexical Discovery

• The University of Texas at Arlington — July 2024
• University of Maryland, College Park (adapted) — Nov 2024

Appointed by faculty and student body to serve as vice chair; represent 4,200+ CS undergraduates.

Represented 1000+ peers, ran events & workshops, and reformed class curricula.

Represented the CS Dept. & CMNS College at admissions events and to official guests.

Mentorship

• Office of Undergraduate Research: Juan Cortés, Kemisola Benson, Vivian Akpala — 2025
• Technica Mentoring: Savya Miriyala, Tanya Grover, Jessica Ononye, Nakshatra Hiray — 2024
• Technica Hackathon: Volunteer and mentor — Oct 2024
• MSET Robotics Workshops: Organizer and curriculum designer — 2020 – 2022