Neel Bhandari
Hello! I am a Master’s student in the [Language Technologies Institute](https://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/) within the [School of Computer Science](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/) at [Carnegie Mellon University](https://www.cmu.edu/). I am currently working with [Prof. Maarten Sap](https://maartensap.com/) on research that focuses on developing neurosymbolic methods to enhance model safety and mitigate reward hacking**, as well as investigating how LLM agents demonstrate different forms of social intelligence in non-cooperative scenarios.
Gates Hillman Center
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
I am spent the past summer interning at Adobe as an ML Intern, where I developed agentic frameworks for creative content generation and performance marketing within Adobe GenStudio.
Prior to joining CMU, I spent two fantastic years at PayPal as a Machine Learning Scientist. There, I developed PayPal’s first automated root cause identification tool, which extracts root causes and problem statements from millions of customer chat transcripts. I was also part of the team that worked on the first LLM-based PayPal Assistant chatbot.
My research has focused on multilingual NLP and robustness. I contributed to the Aya Project, where we developed a state-of-the-art multilingual model covering 100 languages (We won Best Paper at ACL 2024!). My specific contributions included efficient data pruning and pipelining to create an accessible model. Additionally, I collaborated with Dr. Pin-Yu Chen at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, studying the robustness of text-based adversarial attacks from a multilingual lens.
selected publications
- Best Paper at ACL 2024Aya model: An instruction finetuned open-access multilingual language modelarXiv preprint arXiv:2402.07827, 2024
- Out of Style: RAG’s Fragility to Linguistic Variation2025
- Lost in translation: Generating adversarial examples robust to round-trip translationIn ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023