collaborators

6 papers

cs.LG2026

Understanding Layer Patching in Model Size Interpolation

Sara Kangaslahti, Jonathan Geuter, Nihal V. Nayak +3

Zero-shot model size interpolation aims to create new models of intermediate target sizes by combining existing models without additional training. Recent work on boomerang distill…

cs.LG2026

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

Nihal V. Nayak, Paula Rodriguez-Diaz, Neha Hulkund +2

Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the…

cs.LG2026

Boomerang Distillation Enables Zero-Shot Model Size Interpolation

Sara Kangaslahti, Nihal V. Nayak, Jonathan Geuter +3

Large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed under diverse memory and compute constraints. Existing approaches build model families by training each size independently, whic…

cs.CL2025

Revisiting Generalization Across Difficulty Levels: It's Not So Easy

Yeganeh Kordi, Nihal V. Nayak, Max Zuo +2

We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation. Existing research is…

cs.CL2025

$100K or 100 Days: Trade-offs when Pre-Training with Academic Resources

Apoorv Khandelwal, Tian Yun, Nihal V. Nayak +4

Pre-training is notoriously compute-intensive and academic researchers are notoriously under-resourced. It is, therefore, commonly assumed that academics can't pre-train models. In…

cs.LG2025

K-Paths: Reasoning over Graph Paths for Drug Repurposing and Drug Interaction Prediction

Tassallah Abdullahi, Ioanna Gemou, Nihal V. Nayak +4

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) encode rich, structured information critical for drug discovery tasks, but extracting meaningful insights from large-scale KGs remains challenging…