Yash Mehta's Website

HHMI Janelia Research Campus.

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Located in Virginia, USA

Hi! I am an incoming PhD student at Johns Hopkins (spring’24), where I will be working on multimodal foundation models and AI in health. Throughout my academic journey, I have gained valuable experience in various domains, including transformers, LLMs, neuroscience, and cognition. I am currently a research engineer at Janelia working at the intersection of deep learning and neuroscience with James Fitzgerald and Jan Funke. Specifically, I’m working on meta-learning synaptic plasticity rules in a connectome-constrained artificial neural network.

I am very fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to work with brilliant researchers, who have really inspired me and shaped my attitude towards research. I have worked on Neural Architecture Search in Frank Hutter’s AutoML lab in the most lovely town of Freiburg! Before that, I had an amazing time at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, where I was working on evaluating biologically plausible perturbation-based learning algorithms to train deep networks with Tim Lillicrap at DeepMind and Peter Latham. I did my undergraduate thesis at NTU Singapore with Erik Cambria on using large language models for personality prediction. I quit my software development job at Amazon to dive into research full time ;)

I thoroughly enjoy coding and working on hard algorithmic problems.

News

Jul 20, 2023 Attending ICML 2023 in Hawaii! ✨🍻
Apr 14, 2023 Accepted PhD position in computational cognitive science at Johns Hopkins! 🎓
Dec 1, 2022 Attended NeurIPS 2022 in New Orleans! ✨🎷
Oct 1, 2022 Visiting student researcher in Larry Abbott’s lab at the Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University
Sep 14, 2022 Manuscript on node perturbation learning accepted to NeurIPS!
May 27, 2022 Got Married! :ring: :sparkles: :sunny:
Apr 25, 2022 Presented our paper, NAS-BenchSuite in ICLR’22.
Jan 10, 2022 Started at HHMI Janelia Research Campus in the Funke Lab

Selected Publications

  1. Stability and Scalability of Node Perturbation Learning
    Naoki Hiratani, Yash MehtaTimothy Lillicrap, and Peter Latham
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
  2. NAS-Bench-Suite: NAS Evaluation is (Now) Surprisingly Easy
    Yash Mehta, Colin White, Arber Zela, Arjun Krishnakumar, and 5 more authors
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022
  3. Towards Biologically Plausible Convolutional Networks
    Roman Pogodin, Yash MehtaTimothy Lillicrap, and Peter Latham
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021