Utkarsh Tiwari (he/him)

Hi! I'm an incoming PhD student at Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago in the University of Chicago, where I'll be advised by Prof. Will Merrill. I recently graduated with a B.E. in Computer Science from BITS Pilani where I spent the best 4 years of my life (so far). I'm (largely) interested in ML theory, theoretical CS and their connections. In the past I have been involved in computer vision research at the Kiran Bhat Computer Graphics and Computer Vision lab at BITS Pilani and as a summer intern at the STARS team at INRIA Sophia Antipolis. After which, I worked on interpretability, ML theory, and formal languages. I interned at Prof. Manik Varma's lab at Microsoft Research, India where I worked on ML Systems and GPU optimizations. I was also very lucky to be advised by Dr. Amit Deshpande during my time at MSR.

I also enjoy writing blogposts about math and cs when I find the time. Please check them out if you can! More informally, I (used to) mantain a list of papers and projects that I've recently read and liked, along with some in-the-works projects of my own. If you find my profile interesting or useful to your projects, or even for just a chat, feel free to reach out. All spelling errors are left in as proofs of human-generated text :)

Email  /  Resume  /  Blogs  /  Scholar  /  Github

profile photo

Research
Image description On the Hardness of “Infinite Energy” Puzzles
Utkarsh Tiwari , Utkarsh Thanvi, Armaan Sethi, Aalok Thakkar, Neeldhara Misra.
Under Review.
(Early results accepted at the JCDCG^3 conference)
Image description Modeling Tool Use in Transformers via Computation Oracles
Utkarsh Tiwari , Sai Soumya Nalli, Amit Deshpande, Michael Hahn.
Under Review.
(Early results accepted at the FLaNN workshop at Yale University, and Workshop on Latent & Implicit Thinking ICLR 2026)
Slides from presentation at LaCoCo lab,
Poster from FLaNN workshop, Yale University

Image description Improving Reachability on Reasoning Puzzles
Sukruta Prakash Midigeshi, Sai Soumya Nalli, Utkarsh Tiwari, Amit Deshpande, Nagarajan Natarajan, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian, Amit Sharma, Gaurav Sinha.
(Accepted at the Workshop on LLM Reasoning, ICLR 2026) OpenReview

Image description Emergent Stack Representations in Modeling Counter Languages Using Transformers
Utkarsh Tiwari, Aviral Gupta, Michael Hahn
ICLR, 2025 (Accepted at the World Models Workshop!)
NAACL, 2025 (Accepted at the Student Research Workshop!)
arXiv

Image description DebateBench: A Challenging Long Context Reasoning Benchmark For Large Language Models
Utkarsh Tiwari, Aryan Seth, Adi Mukherjee, Kaavya Mera, Kavish, Dhruv Kumar
NAACL, 2025 (Accepted at the Student Research Workshop!)

Image description What Matters in Autonomous Driving Anomaly Detection: A Weakly Supervised Horizon
Utkarsh Tiwari, Snehashis Majhi, Michal Balazia, François Brémond
ECCV, 2024 (Accepted with an Oral presentation at the ROAM workshop!)
arXiv / code


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