Yash Mehta
I’m a third-year grad student in Computational Cognitive Science, working with Mick Bonner, studying representations in biological and artificial neural networks. My research investigates how brains and AI systems learn to internally represent information. My background is in CS, and I’ve also worked as a software engineer. I’m doing research on AI agents for neuroscientific discovery, helping us understand the computational principles in visual processing. I’m excited about startups, AI (no shit!), traveling (experiences!), swim/bike training (david goggins 🙏🏻), and coffee ☕ I have also built the following tools:
Research experience
I’ve had the opportunity to explore several research areas and work in different labs in 🇺🇸, 🇯🇵, 🇩🇪, 🇬🇧, 🇸🇬, and 🇮🇳. Here are some of the topics I’ve worked on:
- Representations in biological and artificial networks 🧠 2025 (under review) NeurIPS’24 NeurIPS’22 NeurIPS’21
- Neural architecture search 🔍 ICLR’22
- Large language models for personality trait prediction 🤖 IEEE ICDM’20 AI Review’20 FGCS’22
I also completed a short PhD rotation project at Harvard Medical School with Pranav Rajpurkar, focusing on knowledge graphs for automating radiology report generation.
If any of this resonates with your interests, I’d love to connect—feel free to reach out!
Industry experience
News
| Feb 8, 2026 | My project on coarse-grained training of deep neural networks selected as a talk (~10%) at VSS 2026! 👁️ |
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| Jan 30, 2026 | Joining Microsoft Research in Redmond as a research intern on the Deep Learning team! |
| Dec 25, 2025 | Recipient of the $10,000 Gemini Grant for Researchers award from Google! 🎉 |
| Dec 6, 2025 | Attended NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego! 🌴 |
| Mar 1, 2025 | Will be joining Sakana AI as a research scientist intern from summer 2025! 🗼🇯🇵 |
| Feb 5, 2025 | Accepted into Y Combinator AI Startup School in SF for 2025! 🚀 |
| Sep 25, 2024 | Our paper on infering synaptic plasticity rules got accepted at NeurIPS 2024! 🏆 |
| Jun 15, 2024 | Gave a talk on my work at Koita Center for Digital Health at IIT Bombay. |
| Oct 15, 2023 | Started at Harvard Medical School with Pranav Rajpurkar to work on knowledge graphs for automated radiology report generation 🏥 |
| Sep 1, 2023 | “Multimodal Foundation Models @ICML’23” at SenticLab in NTU Singapore! |
| Aug 19, 2023 | Research visit to the Flatiron Institute and PolymathicAI team - multimodal foundation models for science! |
| Jul 20, 2023 | Attended ICML 2023 in Hawaii! 🏄🏻♂️🌸 |
| Mar 23, 2023 | My application for US immigration has been approved under EB1A category - individual of outstanding ability! 🇺🇸 |
| Dec 1, 2022 | Co-presented work on node perturbation at NeurIPS 2022 in New Orleans! ✨🎷 |
| Oct 1, 2022 | 1 month as a student researcher in Larry Abbott’s lab at the Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University! 🗽 |
| May 27, 2022 | Got Married!    |
| May 1, 2022 | Our special issue “Future-generation personality prediction from digital footprints” was accepted at FGCS international journal! Managing guest editor 🤝 |
| Apr 25, 2022 | Presented our NAS-BenchSuite paper on neural architecture search at ICLR’22. |
| Jan 10, 2022 | Started at HHMI Janelia Research Campus working on modeling synaptic plasticity with James Fitzgerald and Jan Funke 🪰 |
| Nov 1, 2021 | Co-created attention and transformers module with Prof. Frank Hutter. Also served as TA for Deep Learning Lab, and Deep Learning MSc. courses. |
| Oct 15, 2020 | Joined the AutoML group with Frank Hutter at University of Freiburg, Germany, to work on neural architecture search. |
| Jan 10, 2019 | Joined Gatsby Unit, UCL in London as a Research Assistant working on biologically plausiblle credit assignment algorithms with Peter Latham and Tim Lillicrap (DeepMind)! ⚡️🙌🏼 |
| Jul 15, 2018 | Started working at Amazon as a software development engineer in Bangalore. |
| Jul 1, 2018 | Graduated in Computer Science from BITS Pilani Goa! 🎓 |
| Jan 15, 2018 | Started undergraduate research thesis with Erik Cambria on using large language models for personality trait prediction. |