Nilesh Sarkar

I'm an AI researcher at Lossfunk. I work on world models - how an agent builds a picture of its world, and how it keeps learning when the rewards almost never come.

Nilesh Sarkar - AI Researcher
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Research projects

Language Modeling Experimentation Experiments

Fine-tuning 0.5B-7B LLMs with QLoRA and 4/8-bit quantization, deployed on Jetson Nano. Active threads: diffusion language models and aggressive compression (PTQ/QAT/AWQ/GPTQ/pruning) feeding Indic text generation.

LLM Efficiency PyTorch CUDA Diffusion LMs Quantization Indic NLP

Interpretability Experiments & SAEs Experiments Erdős AI Lab

Mechanistic interpretability with SAEs: attention circuits, feature attribution, and the full SAE gallery from the KD paper. See the gallery.

Mechanistic Interpretability SAEs PyTorch

Medical AI: PCOS Detection Research PCOS

Study of 18 vision models for PCOS ultrasound. A hybrid CNN-ViT performed best, and a three-stage deduplication pipeline cleaned much of the public dataset. Read more.

Medical AI Computer Vision ViT PyTorch

AI × Bio: Protein Folding Experiments Independent

Four results on 1 GPU: a 1 µs chignolin fold, titin I27 force-pulling, an 8-protein ESMFold sweep in 12.9 s, and ESMFold calibration. Read more.

Computational Biology Structure Prediction PyTorch

Autonomous Drone Systems (AIR) Research Group

Computer vision for detection and autonomous navigation in real-world flight settings.

Robotics Computer Vision UAV

Project Humanoid Robot Research Project

Teleoperated robotic arm focused on low-latency control and precise manipulation.

Teleoperation Robotics Control Systems
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Research experience

Lossfunk: Researcher Internship

World models and continual learning for game-playing agents in sparse-reward environments.

World Models Continual Learning Sparse Rewards Game-Playing Agents

Erdős AI Lab: Founding AI Researcher Research

Research on knowledge distillation, representation learning, world models, and interpretability in a student-founded lab. Read more.

AI Research Representation Learning Knowledge Distillation Interpretability

Moog Controls: Applied AI Research Intern Internship

Agentic RAG, document intelligence, an internal MCP server, gesture recognition, and supply-chain AI for aerospace. Read more.

RAG Agentic AI MCP Computer Vision

Undergrad Student Researcher, DSU Department

Department-led research across language models, autonomous drones, humanoid robotics, and medical AI. See all DSU work.

LLMs Drones Humanoid Robotics Medical AI

Humans Care Foundation: Python Developer Intern Internship

Built a portfolio of 24 Python projects: data visualisations, Tkinter GUIs, and an end-to-end chatbot, with project management on GitHub and Notion.

Python Tkinter Chatbot
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Leadership, community & ventures

Erdős AI Lab: Founding AI Researcher Venture

Lab founded by students, working on knowledge distillation, world models, and frontier AI. Read more.

AI Research Representation Learning Knowledge Distillation

E-Cell DSU: Tech Lead Leadership

Leading tech initiatives for entrepreneurial ventures: overseeing infrastructure and bridging business ideas with technical solutions.

Roboverse & IET DSU: Core Committee Member Community

Core Committee, Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) DSU chapter and the Roboverse student community; ran 10+ tech talks, workshops, and hackathons bridging theory with practice in AI and robotics.

IEEE DSU SBC: Executive Committee, RAS & CIS Leadership

Executive Committee, IEEE RAS and IEEE CIS at DSU. 50+ workshops, talks, and hackathons. RAS & CIS Exceptional Volunteering Award, 2025, given to the top 10% of undergraduate researchers at the university.

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Education

Dayananda Sagar University, Bangalore B.Tech

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Engineering (2023-2027). Designed and taught the LLM Engineering curriculum and lab manuals in my 5th semester, published on the university website - read the manual.

Computer Vision LLM/ML/AI Deep Learning Robotics Transformers
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Get in touch

If you're working on world models, interpretability, or anything nearby, I'd like to hear about it.