About

I am a CS PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Vatsal Sharan of the USC CS Theory Group. I am fortunate to work closely with Prof. Christos Thrampoulidis and Prof. Mahdi Soltanolkotabi.

My research focuses on making foundational advances to improve our understanding of deep learning-based systems and making them more reliable and trustworthy. I use both theoretical tools and empirical insights to analyze the optimization and generalization dynamics of ML models, improve their robustness to distributional shifts, and, generally, develop faithful abstractions of ML model behavior.

I was a visiting graduate student at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley during Fall’24 for the Modern Paradigms in Generalization program. In Summer’24, I interned with Dr. Hidenori Tanaka’s group, co-affiliated with PHI, NTT and CBS, Harvard.

I graduated from IIT Roorkee with a bachelor’s in ECE, where I worked on generative adversarial network-based methods for compressive sensing MRI reconstruction. I also interned at Northwestern University as an SN Bose Scholar in Summer’19.

Besides research, I enjoy being outdoors, hiking, reading, and swimming.

Email: bvasudev [at] usc [dot] edu