Hi! I’m a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon working with Daniel Fried. My research focuses on training machine learning models to communicate effectively and efficiently with people.
I completed my undergraduate and master’s degrees at IIIT Hyderabad studying computer science and computational linguistics, advised by Monojit Choudhury and Dipti Misra Sharma. I have spent as an intern at Autodesk working with Evan Pu and Will McCarthy and previously at Mila (with Sarath Chandar and Prasanna Parthasarathi).
Feel free to get in touch if you want to chat about research! If you’re looking to apply to PhD programs in NLP or ML, I annotated my statement of purpose with the ideas and reasoning that went behind it in the hope that it will demystify the process for others. Check it out along with other resources at this page!
News
| 30 April 2025 | Very excited to share our work on mrCAD on multimodal communication! This large-scale dataset is rich with interesting communicative phenomena in instruction generation and following, and is accompanied by a gym-like environment to make benchmarking (and more!) easy. |
| 20 May 2024 | Starting an internship at Autodesk working with Evan Pu for the summer! |
| 15 May 2024 | Akhila's paper on evaluating non-literal language understanding in conversational agents has been accepted to appear at ACL 2024! |
| 1 May 2024 | Our paper on amortizing pragmatic program synthesis with ranking has been accepted to appear at ICML! |
| 16 January 2024 | Our paper on training pragmatic program synthesizers has been accepted to appear at ICLR 2024! |
Publications
Success and Cost Elicit Convention Formation for Efficient Communication
Saujas Vaduguru,
Yilun Hua,
Yoav Artzi,
Daniel Fried
preprint, 2025.
Identifying & Interactively Refining Ambiguous User Goals for Data Visualization Code Generation
Mert Inan,
Anthony Sicilia,
Alex Xie,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Daniel Fried,
Malihe Alikhani
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.
mrCAD: Multimodal Refinement of Computer-aided Designs
William P. McCarthy*,
Saujas Vaduguru*,
Karl D. D. Willis,
Justin Matejka,
Judith E. Fan,
Daniel Fried,
Yewen Pu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2025.
[code]
Analyzing Information Sharing and Coordination in Multi-Agent Planning
Tianyue Ou,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Daniel Fried
preprint, 2025.
Amortizing Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Rankings
Yewen Pu,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Priyan Vaithilingam,
Elena Glassman,
Daniel Fried
41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.
Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Intent Resolution in LLMs
Akhila Yerukola,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Daniel Fried,
Maarten Sap
62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
Generating Pragmatic Examples to Train Neural Program Synthesizers
Saujas Vaduguru,
Daniel Fried,
Yewen Pu
12th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Symbolic Planning and Code Generation for Grounded Dialogue
Justin T. Chiu,
Wenting Zhao,
Derek Chen,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Alexander M. Rush,
Daniel Fried
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
Adapting to Gradual Distribution Shifts with Continual Weight Averaging
Jared Fernandez,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Sanket Vaibhav Mehta,
Yonatan Bisk,
Emma Strubell
Workshop on High-dimensional Learning Dynamics, 2023.
Probing Negation in Language Models
Shashwat Singh,
Shashwat Goel,
Saujas Vaduguru,
Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP), 2023.
Stress Rules from Surface Forms
Saujas Vaduguru,
Partho Sarthi,
Dipti Misra Sharma,
Monojit Choudhury
International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), 2021.
Efficient Pragmatic Program Synthesis with Informative Specifications
Saujas Vaduguru,
Kevin Ellis,
Yewen Pu
Workshop on Meaning in Context: Pragmatic Communication in Humans and Machines, 2021.
[talk],
[code]
Sample-efficient Linguistic Generalizations through Program Synthesis: Experiments with Phonology Problems
Saujas Vaduguru,
Aalok Sathe,
Monojit Choudhury,
Dipti Misra Sharma
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, 2021.
[dataset]