Sai Adith Senthil Kumar

About Me

I’m Sai Adith Senthil Kumar, a dual-degree Computer Science student at George Mason University, pursuing my B.S. (’26) and M.S. (’27) with a concentration in Machine Learning.

My work focuses on LLM interpretability and instruction-following, with an emphasis on activation-level methods (e.g., sparse autoencoders), persona simulation, and reasoning efficiency (“thinking” vs. “no-thinking” behaviors under strict constraints).

In industry, I’ve built and deployed end-to-end AI systems including OCR + RAG pipelines and real-time insight generation with a focus on measurable improvements in accuracy, latency, and reliability.

Research Interests

• Mechanistic interpretability (Sparse Autoencoders, feature analysis, activation steering)
• Instruction following (constraint satisfaction, persona simulation, counterfactual behavior)
• Efficiency & systems (reasoning budgets, lightweight steering/gating, deployment-aware evaluation)
• Trustworthy / safe LLMs (watermarking, monitoring signals, robustness testing)
• RAG systems (OCR → chunking → reranking → evaluation, hallucination reduction)

News

• [Aug. 2025] Completed my AI Research & Engineering Summer Associate role at AriesView (OCR + RAG lease abstraction deployed on Azure).
• [July 2025] Our paper on Counterfactual Instruction Following was accepted at Social Simulation @ COLM 2025; the public version is available on arXiv.
• [May. 2025] Completed my AI Engineer internship at Voicebotics AI, building real-time call-insight pipelines.
• [Aug. 2024] Completed my ML Engineer internship at Rise Consultancy EDU, developing an AI-driven personalized learning-path generator.

Publications

• Can LLMs Simulate Personas with Reversed Performance? A Benchmark for Counterfactual Instruction Following
  Sai Adith Senthil Kumar, Hao Yan, Saipavan Perepa, Murong Yue, Ziyu Yao
  Social Simulation Workshop @ COLM 2025 (accepted)
  [PDF] [arXiv]

Experiences

• NLP Researcher, George Mason University Dec 2023 — ongoing
• AI Research & Engineering Summer Associate, AriesView — May 2025 - Aug 2025
• AI Engineer Intern, Voicebotics AI — Jan 2025 - May 2025
• Machine Learning Engineer Intern, Rise Consultancy EDU — May 2024 - Aug 2024

Services

Reviewers

• Social Simulation @ COLM’25

Leadership & Campus Roles

• Residential Assistant: managed and supported 30+ students (community building, conflict resolution, event coordination).
• IT Technician: maintained and troubleshot 200+ machines (imaging, deployments, hardware/software support).
• Learning Assistant (Linear Algebra): supported instruction and tutoring for 40+ students (office hours, recitations, exam review).
• President, GMU Club Tennis: led operations for 80+ members (practice scheduling, events, team coordination).

Talks

• [Oct 2025] “Counterfactual Instruction Following” — Social Simulation @ COLM 2025 (paper presentation), Montreal, Canada.
• [May 2025] Poster presentation — Celebration of Student Scholarship and Impact & CEC Research Celebration, George Mason University.

Awards

• KEEN Award (GMU Research Celebration) — $1,000. [Certificate PDF]

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