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Sumanth R Hegde
Hello
I’m a software engineer at Anyscale. My primary interests are broadly in machine learning. I’m an avid reader and spend my free time reading and learning about a bunch of different topics, from psychology and finance to cryptocurrency and machine learning! I have a keen interest in startups and the future of software! Lately, like a lot of people, I’ve been trying to make sense of language models.
Previously, I completed my master’s in computer science at UC San Diego. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree (Hons.) in Electical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Experience
Working on the LLM team at Anyscale wearing many hats.
Current project: Core member of the NovaSky project (Jan 2025 - Present).
- One of the core contributors of SkyRL: https://github.com/NovaSky-AI/SkyRL , building a full stack library for post-training LLMs.
- Integrated FlashRL with SkyRL, enabling training with quantized rollouts: https://skyrl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/flash_rl.html
- Core contributor to https://novasky-ai.notion.site/skyrl-v0 - implemented a scalable remote server for RL training on SWE-Gym, contributed to building asynchronous multi-turn rollout implementation to improve SWE-Bench performance of Qwen-3-8B by 5.8%.
- Core contributor to https://novasky-ai.notion.site/skyrl-sql , one of the first open-source models trained with multi-turn RL on Text2SQL - matching GPT-4o and o4-mini on the Spider benchmark.
- One of the core maintainers for the Skythought repo: https://github.com/NovaSky-AI/SkyThought/commits?author=SumanthRH
- Led building the evaluation suite for SkyThought.
Previous project: LLMForge (May 2024 - December 2024) Worked on new fine-tuning features, performance improvements, product CLI/SDK, etc
- Added support for different fine-tuning tasks (such as instruction tuning and causal LM) training as well as function-calling fine-tuning.
- Improved model support to allow bringing any HuggingFace model with any chat template to fine-tune on Anyscale.
- Led building the LLM Models SDK for easily going from fine-tuning to serving on the platform.
Worked on the Generative AI team at C3!
- Set up a finetuning codebase from scratch for C3’s Generative Search application
- Features: Support for difference causal and sequence-2-sequence models, ability to mix different training datasets (for a text-to-text or a causal language modelling task), visualize metrics on multiple evaluation datasets, etc
- Trained 10B+ parameter models on 1M+ samples using DeepSpeed and 🤗 Accelerate.
Graduate Student Researcher
UC San Diego
May 2023 – Apr 2024 San Diego, California
Worked with Canwen Xu and Prof. Julian McAuley on evaluating intermediate task transfer for in-context learning.
This was a part time internship I did with Hakimo in Spring'23. This was my first time working on video-based models, so that was fun!
- Worked on video-based object detection models for Hakimo’s Remote Guarding Solution
- Trained 3D ResNets on Hakimo’s video surviellance data and experimented with single and muli-pathway SlowFast networks.
Graduate Teaching Assistant
UC San Diego
Aug 2022 – Mar 2023 San Diego, CA
Served as a Teaching Assistant for CSE 232: Principles of Database Systems and CSE 21: Mathematics for Algorithms and Systems. Was a lot of fun, resposibilities included:
- Conducting weekly discussion sessions for 50+ students.
- Preparing question papers for midterm and final examinations.
Undergraduate Student Researcher
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Oct 2020 – Jul 2021 Chennai, India
Bachelor’s Thesis.
- Demonstrated fast reconstruction of a 12 frame video from a single image of a lensless camera, reducing inference time from 2 hours to 30 milliseconds.
- Proposed an efficient reconstruction framework - a physics-aware neural net
trained in an adversarial fashion, used feature-based loss for photorealism. - Employed a trainable inversion layer to reverse the forward process of the camera, along with a UNet for perceptual enhancement.
- Implemented a face detection algorithm for KYC services.
- Trained a Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network using > 200,000 images.
- Reduced false positives 10 times and false negatives by 2.5 times.
- Employed hard positive mining, data augmentation to reduce recall by 5%.
Talks
Ray Scalable Agent Infrastructure
Aug 2025 – Present San Francisco, CA
Presented on Ray and it’s applications as scalable agent infrastructure at the Agentic AI Summit in UC Berkeley
Guest lecture for CSE 234 (Graduate Computer Systems) covering advanced topics in distributed systems and machine learning infrastructure.
Education
M.S in Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
Sep 2021 – Mar 2024 San Diego, CA
- Specialization in AI/ML
- JUMP mentor for underclassmen at UC San Diego.
- MicroMBA from the Rady School of Management.
B.tech (Honours.) in Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Aug 2017 – Jul 2021 Chennai, India
- My bachelor’s thesis was on video reconstruction for lensless cameras.
- President’s Gold Medal
- Computer Vision and Intelligence Club
Accomplishments
President of India Prize
Awarded the President’s Gold Medal for best academic performance among all graduating students in 2021.
Guest, Republic Day Parade 2020
Invited to the Republic Day Parade by the honourable Prime Minister of India, 2020

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