Hi! I am Shashank Kirtania (he/him), pre-doctoral research fellow at Microsoft PROSE team. I collaborate with Gustavo Soares, Arjun Radhakrishna and Sumit Gulwani. My current research focuses on enhancing the capabilities of language models (LMs) to understand, generate, and evaluate code. This involves discrete text optimization of prompts through techniques such as automatic prompt optimization, prompt synthesis, and external knowledge integration. Recently, I have been concentrating on improving the code generation capabilities of LMs using constrained decoding.

I am applying for PhD positions in the Fall'25 cycle.

Previously, I have been privileged to work with Soma Dhavala and Makarand Tapaswi during my time at Wadhwani AI , developing an AI4Education solution for Indic languages that was deployed in the Indian state of Gujarat. This initiative has completed over 1,000,000 successful assessments in the first 6 months of deployment.

I have also worked closely with Thomas Wiecki at PyMC Labs, where I spent most of my time improving the workflow of Bayesian models present in PyMC.
My more formal curriculum vitae could be found here.

    

Publications google-scholar

• STACKFEED: Structured Textual Actor-Critic Knowledge Base Editing with Feedback preprint
  Shashank Kirtania*, Naman Gupta*, Priyanshu Gupta, Krishna Kariya, Sumit Gulwani, Arun Iyer, Suresh Parthasarathy, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sriram K. Rajamani, Gustavo Soares
  Under review

• MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections arxiv
  Shashank Kirtania*, Priyanshu Gupta*, Annanya Singha*, Sumit Gulwani, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sherry Shi, Gustavo Soares
  Accepted at EMNLP’24 Main       * = shared first author
  
  

• LOGIC-LM++: Multi-Step Refinement for Symbolic Formulations arxiv
  Shashank Kirtania, Priyanshu Gupta, Arjun Radhakrishna
  Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations @ ACL 2024
  
  

• DWT-CompCNN: Deep Image Classification Network for High Throughput JPEG 2000 Compressed Documents link
  Tejasvee Bisen, Mohammed Javed, Shashank Kirtania, P Nagabhushan
  Pattern Analysis and Applications, Springer, 2023