CV

Sakshi Pandey

M.S. by Research in Computer Science · IIT Bombay

sakshipandey@iitb.ac.in
linkedin.com/in/thesakshipandey
github.com/thesakshipandey
Mumbai, India
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Education
2024 – Present
M.S. by Research in Computer Science (Intelligence Systems)
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay · CPI 8.54 / 10.00 (Sem 3)
  • Thesis: Multi-Expert Hybrid Retrieval with Learned Query Routing for Movie Recommendation
  • Advisor: Prof. Arpit Agarwal
2019 – 2023
B.E. in Computer Engineering
University of Mumbai (RGIT) · GPA 8.86 / 10.00
Experience
Sept – Oct 2021
Cybersecurity Intern
Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd. · Mumbai
  • Conducted risk and vulnerability analysis of critical exchange systems
  • Monitored and mitigated threats using IBM QRadar (SIEM) and IBM Watson
  • Deployed Honeycomb trapping techniques as an active decoy mechanism
Research Projects
Aug 2025 –
Present
Multi-Expert Hybrid Retrieval for Movie Recommendation
M.S. Thesis · Guide: Prof. Arpit Agarwal
  • Designed a retrieval system combining semantic, lexical, collaborative, and emotion-aware experts
  • Learned query router trained with BTL pairwise loss over 9,000 human-judged movie pairs
  • Up to 4.5% higher pairwise agreement over BGE-Reranker, Qwen-1.5B, Kimi-K2 on MovieLens-100K
Aug 2024 –
May 2025
Indian Multilingual Jailbreaking
CS626 · Guide: Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya
  • Built Indic-JailbreakBench: 1,668 multilingual malicious prompts across 12 harm categories
  • Proposed four novel jailbreak techniques; up to 35% higher ASR in Indic languages vs. English
  • Evaluated six state-of-the-art LLMs with a multi-judge ASR framework
Jan – May 2025
Reinforcement Learning for Side-Channel CNN Design
R&D · Guide: Prof. Shivaram K. & Sayandeep S.
  • Q-learning agent auto-composing 1D-CNN architectures for profiling-based SCA
  • Composite reward: guessing-entropy convergence + validation accuracy + model-size penalty
  • Executed >2,700 trials on ASCAD, DPAContest v4, and CHES CTF datasets
Course Projects
Aug – Nov 2025
Cross-Lingual Emotion Understanding for Indic Languages
CS772 — Deep Learning for NLP
  • Distilled RoBERTa-GoEmotions into IndicBERT across 5 languages via Procrustes + KL-divergence
  • ~3.3× improvement over zero-shot baselines; F1: 0.42–0.44 across Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil
Aug – Nov 2025
Auction Design for Voluntary Carbon Markets
CS6001 — Game Theory & Mechanism Design
  • Proved cheating is the dominant strategy without a formal mechanism; designed a VCG auction for truthful bidding
Jan – May 2025
Self-Driving Car Controller
CS747 — Foundations of Intelligent & Learning Agents
  • PID controller optimized with CMA-ES; benchmarked against A2C across 6 tracks × 3 seeds
Aug – Nov 2024
Signboard OCR & Transliteration
CS725 — Foundations of Machine Learning
  • Faster R-CNN + EasyOCR + GRU Encoder-Decoder for Hindi→English; 92% detection, 89% transliteration accuracy
Self Projects
Sept – Oct 2025
NutritionRAG — Grounded Nutrition Chatbot
  • Full RAG pipeline with web app; hybrid BM25 + ANN retrieval over textbook corpus in pgvector with inline citations
Jul – Aug 2025
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) from Scratch
  • End-to-end PyTorch implementation of DPO to align LLM outputs with human preference data
2025
RLHF Pipeline from Scratch
  • VPG-based RLHF loop to steer GPT-2 toward positive story generation with KL penalty
2025
Transformer from Scratch
  • Full Transformer architecture (multi-head attention, encoder-decoder) with beam search inference pipeline
Technical Skills
Languages
Python C/C++ Java LaTeX Bash SQL HTML/CSS
Frameworks & Libraries
PyTorch TensorFlow Keras Hugging Face Scikit-learn NumPy Pandas FAISS BM25
Concepts
Recommender Systems Bandits LLMs RAG RLHF DPO Transformers NLP Hybrid Retrieval MoE
Courses
Human-Centered AI Foundations of Machine Learning Online Learning and Optimization Game Theory & Mechanism Design Speech, NLP and the Web Deep Learning for NLP Foundations of Intelligent Agents Organisation of Web Information ML for Remote Sensing II Software Lab Implementation Security in Cryptography
Honors & Awards
2025
Reliance Foundation PG Scholar — one of 100 recipients nationwide for academic excellence and leadership
2025
Inter IIT Tech Meet 14.0 — selected for IIT Bombay's official contingent (Bombay76) in the ObserveAI track
2024
GATE CS — 99.09 percentile (top 0.91%), outperforming 123,967 candidates nationwide
2024
1st place — Kaggle competitions, CS725 — outperforming 198 students in both internal competitions at IIT Bombay
2022
Google DSC Lead — first-ever Developer Student Club Lead at institute; organized technical workshops and hackathons