Vitthal Bhandari

I am a Master's student in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington UW. Before my Master's I spent more than 4 years in the banking industry as a generalist software engineer working at American Express, Standard Chartered Bank, and PayPal. I completed my Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering from BITS Pilani where I also did a minor in Data Science and worked with Prof. Poonam Goyal and Prof. Sundaresan Raman.

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Research [ minimize ]

I'm currently interested in AI Safety from a variety of perspectives - evaluation of language models for hidden objectives/biases; pluralistic alignment of language models; emergent misalignment.

Here is some more information about me.

  • What kind of research am I interested in?: I am an NLP researcher who applies ML to solve sociotechnical issues using human-centered approaches. Few of my major previous projects are:
    1. Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments - Link - ACL 2022 workshop paper
    2. On the Challenges of Building Hate Speech Datasets - Link - preprint
    3. LGBQTweet - A community-sourced dataset for detecting hate against sexual and gender identity minorities
    4. Studying the evolution of attitudes toward gender identity minorities over time across partisan leanings in popular political podcasts - Code
  • What am I currently working on?:
    1. Evaluating the cultural competence of LLMs - Project for LING 575 (Societal Impacts of Language Technology)
    2. Stanford CS 336: Language Modeling from Scratch
  • Regarding the ideas I am interested in exploring, I do have a few broad overarching themes in my mind (non-exhaustive list):
    1. I am interested in assessing the harms of emergent misalignment from a human-centered lens, its effect on user-facing applications such as content moderation, and ways to personalize LMs with different social norms and values
  • Why am I a great hire?: I am a generalist software engineer with 4+ years of experience across American Express, PayPal, and Standard Chartered. Here are some notable highlights and projects I have under my belt:
    1. At Amex, I created a language translation feature (HuggingFace, Sanic, Flask) using the Marian MT framework for translating chats between English and Spanish
    2. At Standard Chartered I led a team of 4 in developing an API management framework (TypeScript, React, Flask) and creating configurable APIs (1.3K+ APIs) to fetch, add, and update data from Oracle SQL and Dremio data lakes
prl On the Challenges of Building Datasets for Hate Speech Detection
Vitthal Bhandari
Preprint

This paper presents a comprehensive framework that standardizes the dataset creation pipeline across seven critical checkpoints by identifying systemic challenges in hate speech dataset creation.

arXiv
blind-date Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments
Vitthal Bhandari and Poonam Goyal
ACL 2022 Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

I contributed to a shared task focused on identifying homophobic and transphobic content in YouTube comments by implementing basic classifiers using multilingual pre-trained language models to analyze English, Tamil, and code-mixed datasets.

Paper | Code
clean-usnob Reviewing the collaborative role of Image processing in retinal imaging
Rehana Khan, Vitthal Bhandari, Sundaresan Raman, Abhishek Vyas, Akshay Raman, Maitreyee Roy and Rajiv Raman
Teleophthalmology and Digital Health: A Practical Guide to Applications, Springer Nature

Paper

Coursework
LING 570: Shallow Processing Techniques for Natural Language Processing
LING 575: Societal Impacts of Language Technology
Stanford CS 336: Language Modeling from Scratch
Harvard CS 2881: AI Safety
Stanford CS 234: Reinforcement Learning

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