CS Graduate Student

Welcome to Gaurav’s Homepage!


Note: This webpage was last updated on 02/22/2026.

About me

Hi folks, welcome to my personal homepage! I’m a second-year MS (thesis) student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Xuan Wang. I am also affiliated with the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.

My research focuses on making small language models better agents – getting compact models to reason well, use tools, and act autonomously without needing massive compute. I work on agentic AI, efficient LLM reasoning, and LLM evaluation. I have published papers at ICLR, EMNLP (Main, ×2), AAAI (Oral), CVPR, and Q1 journals. I also built effGen (GitHub, 100+ stars), an open-source framework for building agentic pipelines with small language models. Most recently, I spent Summer 2025 at Dell Technologies’ Global Office of the CTO, where I built an agentic system for autonomous resource allocation and received 3 Inspire Recognition Awards for positioning Dell PowerEdge as “AI-native” infrastructure.

Prior to Virginia Tech, I completed my Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Manipal University Jaipur in 2023, supervised by Dr. Nitesh Pradhan and working with Dr. Vijaypal Singh Dhaka and Dr. Mahesh Jangid. I was the President’s Gold Medalist for Excellence in Research. After that I worked at Dell Technologies for a year as a Machine Learning Engineer, and before that spent 6 months at Swiggy’s Applied Research (Computer Vision) team.

Research Interests

I work on small language models as capable agents – the core question being: how far can a small model go if you train and design it carefully? My research touches on NLP, reasoning, model efficiency, and agentic systems. Current focus areas:

  1. Efficient Agentic AI with Small Language Models: I build systems where small LMs can act as autonomous agents – calling tools, planning steps, and completing tasks without relying on GPT-5-scale models. I released effGen (GitHub, 100+ stars), a framework for agentic pipelines with small models. The goal is practical: real tasks, low cost, no massive GPU clusters.

  2. Reasoning in Small Language Models and Self-Evolution: I study how much reasoning small models can do and what they lose after compression. This includes chain-of-thought, multi-agent debate, and iterative fine-tuning on model-generated traces so a model can improve itself without human labels (see ThinkSLM and DEBATE, TRAIN, EVOLVE).

  3. LLM Evaluation and Overthinking: Static benchmarks get contaminated fast. I built BeyondBench, which generates fresh math problems algorithmically so evaluation stays clean. I also look at the other side: do models use too many tokens on easy problems? My work on LLM overthinking shows reasoning models can use 18x more tokens while sometimes getting worse answers.

News

  • [Feb. 21, 2026] 🎉 Scaling Agentic RL for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMs got accepted to CVPR 2026!
  • [Jan. 31, 2026] New preprint on effGen—enabling small language models as capable autonomous agents!
  • [Jan. 26, 2026] 🎉 BeyondBench got accepted to ICLR 2026!
  • [Dec. 16, 2025] New preprint on building agent memory that retains, recalls, and reflects!
  • [Nov. 24, 2025] New preprint on scaling agentic reinforcement learning for tool-integrated reasoning in VLMs.
  • [Nov. 7, 2025] 🎉 JudgeBoard got accepted as an Oral at AAAI 2026!
  • [Oct. 8, 2025] New preprint on benchmarking the accuracy-efficiency tradeoff in language models for basic math reasoning!
  • [Sep. 30, 2025] Released BeyondBench—the Benchmark-Free Reasoning Evaluation of LLMs Leaderboard!
  • [Sep. 29, 2025] New preprint on benchmark-free evaluation of reasoning in language models!
  • [Aug. 20, 2025] 🎉 Two of my papers (ThinkSLM and DEBATE, TRAIN, EVOLVE) got accepted to EMNLP 2025 Main Conference!
  • [Aug. 13, 2024] 🎉 Received 3 Inspire Recognition Awards from Dell Technologies Global CTO’s office for my internship work in Agentic AI for Autonomous Resource Allocation!
  • [Jul. 5, 2025] New preprint on basic math reasoning and overthinking in LLMs!
  • [May. 27, 2025] Started my summer internship @ Dell Office of the CTO—Digital Skills Research!
  • [May. 21, 2025] New preprint on self-evolution of language model reasoning!
  • [May. 10, 2025] Released the LLMThinkBench Leaderboard! Currently there are 17 open-sourced and 4 proprietary models!
  • [May. 4, 2025] Released the DataSense framework for data visualization and story generation using language models—install it with pip install datasense!
  • [Apr. 22, 2025] Released ThinkSLM—the SLM Reasoning Leaderboard!
  • [Apr. 5, 2025] Released the LLMThinkBench framework for evaluating basic-math reasoning and over-thinking in language models—install it with pip install llmthinkbench!
  • [Feb. 17, 2025] New preprint on the reasoning abilities of small language models.
  • [Oct. 9, 2024] Accepted a Summer 2025 internship offer at Dell Technologies as an AI Research Intern in the Global Office of the CTO (Round Rock, TX)!
  • [Sep. 4, 2024] Joined Wang’s Group to work on reasoning, small language models, and large language models!
  • [Aug. 6, 2024] Began my M.S. in Computer Science at Virginia Tech!

Honors and Awards

  • 🏆 $50K Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) Grant for effGen, a B2B SaaS agent-building framework startup (2026)
  • 🏆 Accepted to NSF I-Corps™ Program, a 7-week entrepreneurial training program for commercialization of effGen (2026)
  • 🏆 3 Inspire Recognition Awards for positioning Dell PowerEdge as “AI-native” infrastructure, Dell Technologies (2025)
  • 🥇 President’s Gold Medal for Excellence in Research, Manipal University Jaipur (2023)
  • 🥈 Runner-up, Dell IT Development Program (ITDP) FY’23 Hackathon, Dell Technologies (2023)
  • 🪙 Ranked 13/473 globally in Bitgrit Generative AI Competition, Bitgrit (2023)
  • 🪙 117/26,008, Amazon ML Challenge 2023, Amazon (2023)
  • 🥇 Three-time recipient of the Student Excellence Award for publishing research, MUJ (2022 - 2023)
  • 🥇 Best Research Project, Computer Science Department, Manipal University Jaipur (2022)
  • 🥉 All India Grand Finalist, Precision Health Challenge 2021-22 Hackathon, Wipro GE Healthcare (2022)
  • 🥉 All India Grand Finalist, India Automobile Hackathon, NEC and Mitsubishi (2022)
  • 🥉 All India Grand Finalist, HACKBATTLE: Impact Through Data Hackathon, T-Systems (2022)
  • 🥉 3rd Position, “Hack2Hire” Hackathon, Dell Technologies (2021)
  • 🥇 Best Senior Hack, NPSiHacks, Devfolio (2021)
  • 🪙 Kaggle 3X Expert (Top 20% in Competitions, Top 1% in Titanic, Digit Recognizer) (2020 - 2023)