Hello! My name is Ishaan Watts and I am a first-year graduate student in the Machine Learning department at Carnegie Mellon University. I am interested in building self-improving systems which can evolve over time and in exploring reinforcement learning techniques to reason efficiently.

In a past life, I was a Pre-Doctoral Researcher at Google DeepMind under the guidance of Dr. Partha Talukdar. I was part of the 'Modular Large Scale Continual Learning' group, where I explored model composition. I also worked as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research under the guidance of Dr. Sunayana Sitaram, where we tackled the linguistic diversity challenges in India and worked towards fairness in evaluations [NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI]. I completed my bachelor's at IIT Delhi. Outside of research, I’m a bit of a fitness freak and I enjoy going to the gym or do distance-running in my free time. I also love watching cricket!

Keywords: Large Language Models, Continual Learning, Evaluations

For more details about my background, refer to my Resume / CV. If you'd like to chat with me about my research or in general, feel free to reach out via email!

Last Updated: 09/09/2025 • July, 2025: I have been awarded the Narotam Sekhsaria Scholarship ($40,000) and K.C. Mahindra Scholarship ($5,800) to pursue higher studies at CMU!
• June, 2025: My work at DeepMind was acknowledged in the Gemini 2.5-Pro Technical Report. [Link]
• March, 2025: I will be joining the Fall 2025 Masters in Machine Learning (MSML) program at Carnegie Mellon University!
• January, 2025: We have released the cultural artefacts collected in our work "PARIKSHA". [Link]
• December, 2024: Our work "RTP-LX: Can LLMs Evaluate Toxicity in Multilingual Scenarios?" got accepted in the AI for Social Impact track at AAAI 2025!
• September, 2024: Our work "PARIKSHA: A Large-Scale Investigation of Human-LLM Evaluator Agreement on Multilingual and Multi-Cultural Data" got accepted at EMNLP 2024!.
• September, 2024: Gave an invited talk, titled "Evaluations in Multilingual and Multicultural World", at the National Research Council Canada (NRCC).

C=Conference, P=Preprint, ^*=Equal Contribution