Ankur Dahiya Ankur Dahiya Ankur Dahiya

Ankur Dahiya

Undergraduate Researcher  ·  IIT Roorkee  ·  India

Hi, I'm Ankur. I'm an undergrad studying Data Science & Artificial Intelligence at IIT Roorkee, and a core member of the Vision and Language Group (VLG).

My research sits at the intersection of understanding and improving large-scale models. I work on mechanistic interpretability — figuring out the algorithms neural networks actually learn inside — and on RL alignment, building training methods that go beyond simple scalar rewards to produce models that do what we actually want.

I also spend a lot of time on model pruning (we got a paper into AAAI on evolutionary pruning of LLMs) and on the compute infrastructure side — the pipeline optimization, cluster health-checks, and training efficiency work that nobody talks about but everybody needs.

Outside of research, I like long walks, overthinking font choices, and occasionally submitting to the void that is academic peer review.

Find me on GitHub · Scholar · Twitter · LinkedIn · Email

You can also grab my resume ↓

News

Jun 2026

Submitted CATPO: Critique-Augmented Tree Policy Optimization to COLM 2026. The paper introduces critique-augmented tree search for RL alignment.

Jun 2026

Optimized our multi-node training pipeline — reduced epoch wall-clock time by 23% through gradient accumulation tuning and mixed-precision scheduling.

Jun 2026

Deployed automated cluster validation scripts across the VLG compute pool for GPU health-checks.

May 2026

Presented evolutionary pruning framework at VLG internal reading group — discussed scaling laws for pruned subnetworks.

Apr 2026

"Natural Selection of LLMs via Pruning" accepted to the AAAI 2026 Student Abstract Track.

Mar 2026

Started mechanistic interpretability experiments — replicating IOI circuit analysis on GPT-2 Small and Pythia 410M.

Feb 2026

Joined the Vision and Language Group (VLG) at IIT Roorkee as a core research member.

→ full update log

Publications

all publications →

CATPO: Critique-Augmented Tree Policy Optimization

Ankur Dahiya, Umang Goyal, Ayush

Submitted to COLM 2026

[code]  [paper coming soon]

Natural Selection of LLMs via Pruning

Umang Goyal, Ankur Dahiya, Ayush

AAAI 2026 · Student Abstract Track

[code]  [paper coming soon]

Education

IIT Roorkee

Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee

B.Tech in Data Science & Artificial Intelligence

2026 — present

Get in Touch

Always happy to talk about research, interesting problems, or potential collaborations. Email me at adahiya@ds.iitr.ac.in, or reach out on Twitter.