Hello, I'm Mahesh!

M.S. Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

I am a masters student in computer science at UW-Madison, currently working on reinforcement learning generalization and scaffold robustness with Manolis Vlatakis and Aniket Rege. I am broadly interested in research in cooperative multi-agent reasoning, reinforcement learning, and evaluation of large language models.

I am also currently interning at Kalpa Labs (YC F25), working on large-scale generalized audio model training. Previously, I was a Quant Researcher at JP Morgan Chase and interned at WorldQuant. I received a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras.

News

Apr 2026 Sparks of Cooperative Reasoning accepted at ICML 2026!
Feb 2026 Started as ML Intern at Kalpa Labs (YC F25) in San Francisco.
Dec 2025 Sparks of Cooperative Reasoning accepted at NeurIPS 2025 LAW Workshop.
Oct 2025 CuRe accepted at ICCV 2025.
Jun 2025 CuRe accepted at CVPR DemoDiv Workshop (Oral).
Feb 2024 MABViT accepted at Deployable AI Workshop, AAAI 2024 (Oral).

Publications

Sparks of Cooperative Reasoning: LLMs as Strategic Hanabi Agents

Mahesh Ramesh, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Aswinkumar Ramkumar, Pavan Thodima, Aniket Rege, Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

ICML 2026

[arXiv] [code]
CuRe: Cultural Gaps in the Long Tail of Text-to-Image Models

Aniket Rege, Zinnia Nie, Mahesh Ramesh, Unmesh Raskar, Zhuoran Yu, Aditya Kusupati, Yong Jae Lee, Ramya Korlakai Vinayak

ICCV 2025 · CVPR DemoDiv Workshop (Oral)

[arXiv] [project page]
MABViT: Modified Attention Block Enhances Vision Transformers

Mahesh Ramesh, Aswinkumar Ramkumar

Deployable AI Workshop, AAAI 2024 (Oral)

[arXiv]

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison Sep 2024 – May 2026

M.S. Computer Science
Indian Institute of Technology Madras Jul 2019 – Jul 2023

B.Tech Chemical Engineering

Experience

Kalpa Labs (YC F25) Feb 2026 – Present

Machine Learning Intern, San Francisco

Large-scale generalized audio model training; dense and MoE architectures.
JP Morgan Chase & Co Aug 2023 – Aug 2024

Quantitative Research Analyst, Asset & Wealth Management

Outlier-detection for risk sensitivities; product-risk rating framework.
WorldQuant LLC May 2022 – Jul 2022

Quantitative Research Intern, Mumbai

Alpha weighting modules in C++; constrained optimization for production portfolios.
Dassault Aviation — IIT Madras Jan 2022 – May 2023

B.Tech Thesis

VAE with attention for flight telemetry augmentation; presented at RBCDSAI 2023.

Competitions & Red Teaming

OpenAI GPTOSS-20B Red Teaming Hackathon — Honorable Mention (Top 20 / 611)
OpenAI Bio Bug Bounty — Participant in biological risk red-teaming program
Frontier Lab Red Teaming — Invited participant in an additional frontier model red-teaming program