Neel Bhandari

Hello! I am a Masters student in the Language Technologies Institute within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I am currently working with Prof. Maarten Sap on research that examines the robustness of RAG systems when faced with real-world linguistic variations, as well as investigating how LLM agents demonstrate different forms of social intelligence in non-cooperative scenarios.

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Gates Hillman Center

5000 Forbes Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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

  1. Best Paper at ACL 2024
    Aya model: An instruction finetuned open-access multilingual language model
    Ahmet Üstün, Viraat Aryabumi, Zheng-Xin Yong, and 8 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.07827, 2024
  2. Lost in translation: Generating adversarial examples robust to round-trip translation
    Neel Bhandari, and Pin-Yu Chen
    In ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023