Researcher profile

Ajay Jaiswal

Ajay Jaiswal contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate

Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 19 - UnverifiedVerification L1Unclaimed author
5works
0followers
5topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

TIDE: Every Layer Knows the Token Beneath the Context

We revisit a universally accepted but under-examined design choice in every modern LLM: a token index is looked up once at the input embedding layer and then permanently discarded. This single-injection assumption induces two structural failures: (i) the Rare Token Problem, where a Zipf-type distribution of vocabulary causes rare-token embeddings are chronically under-trained due to receiving a fraction of the cumulative gradient signal compared to common tokens; and (ii) the Contextual Collapse Problem, where limited parameters models map distributionally similar tokens to indistinguishable hidden states. As an attempt to address both, we propose TIDE, which augments the standard transformer with EmbeddingMemory: an ensemble of K independent MemoryBlocks that map token indices to context-free semantic vectors, computed once and injected into every layer through a depth-conditioned softmax router with a learnable null bank. We theoretically and empirically establish the benefits of TIDE in addressing the issues associated with single-token identity injection as well as improve performance across multiple language modeling and downstream tasks.

preprint2026arXiv

Unmasking On-Policy Distillation: Where It Helps, Where It Hurts, and Why

On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used, and in the case of self-distillation, which specific context should serve as the supervisory signal? Does the optimal choice vary from one token to the next? At present, addressing these questions typically requires costly training runs whose aggregate performance metrics obscure the dynamics at the level of individual tokens. We introduce a training-free diagnostic framework that operates at the highest resolution: per token, per question, and per teacher. We derive an ideal per-node gradient defined as the parameter update that maximally increases the student's probability of success. We then develop a scalable targeted-rollout algorithm to estimate this gradient efficiently, even for long chains of intermediate thoughts. The gradient alignment score, defined as the cosine similarity between this ideal gradient and any given distillation gradient, quantifies the extent to which a particular configuration approximates the ideal signal. Across a range of self-distillation settings and external teacher models, we observe that distillation guidance exhibits substantially higher alignment with the ideal on incorrect rollouts than on correct ones, where the student already performs well and the teacher's signal tends to become noisy. Furthermore, we find that the optimal distillation context depends jointly on the student model's capacity and the target task, and that no single universally effective configuration emerges. These findings motivate the use of per-task, per-token diagnostic analyses for distillation.

preprint2022arXiv

Team formation and team performance: The balance between team freshness and repeat collaboration

Incorporating fresh members in teams is considered a pathway to team creativity. However, whether freshness improves team performance or not remains unclear, as well as the optimal involvement of fresh members for team performance. This study uses a group of authors on the byline of a publication as a proxy for a scientific team. We extend an indicator, i.e., team freshness, to measure the extent to which a scientific team incorporates new members, by calculating the fraction of new collaboration relations established within the team. Based on more than 43 million scientific publications covering more than a half-century of research from Microsoft Academic Graph, this study provides a holistic picture of the current development of team freshness by outlining the temporal evolution of freshness, and its disciplinary distribution. Subsequently, using a multivariable regression approach, we examine the association between team freshness and papers'short-term and long-term citations.The major findings are as follows: (1)team freshness in scientific teams has been increasing in the past half-century; (2)there exists an inverted-U-shaped association between team freshness and papers' citations in all the disciplines and in different periods;(3)the inverted-U-shaped relationship between team freshness and papers' citations is only found in small teams, while, in large teams, team freshness is significantly positively related to papers' citations.

preprint2022arXiv

Training Your Sparse Neural Network Better with Any Mask

Pruning large neural networks to create high-quality, independently trainable sparse masks, which can maintain similar performance to their dense counterparts, is very desirable due to the reduced space and time complexity. As research effort is focused on increasingly sophisticated pruning methods that leads to sparse subnetworks trainable from the scratch, we argue for an orthogonal, under-explored theme: improving training techniques for pruned sub-networks, i.e. sparse training. Apart from the popular belief that only the quality of sparse masks matters for sparse training, in this paper we demonstrate an alternative opportunity: one can carefully customize the sparse training techniques to deviate from the default dense network training protocols, consisting of introducing ``ghost" neurons and skip connections at the early stage of training, and strategically modifying the initialization as well as labels. Our new sparse training recipe is generally applicable to improving training from scratch with various sparse masks. By adopting our newly curated techniques, we demonstrate significant performance gains across various popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet), architectures (ResNet-18/32/104, Vgg16, MobileNet), and sparse mask options (lottery ticket, SNIP/GRASP, SynFlow, or even randomly pruning), compared to the default training protocols, especially at high sparsity levels. Code is at https://github.com/VITA-Group/ToST

preprint2020arXiv

Solomon at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Ensemble Architecture for Fine-Tuned Propaganda Detection in News Articles

This paper describes our system (Solomon) details and results of participation in the SemEval 2020 Task 11 "Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles"\cite{DaSanMartinoSemeval20task11}. We participated in Task "Technique Classification" (TC) which is a multi-class classification task. To address the TC task, we used RoBERTa based transformer architecture for fine-tuning on the propaganda dataset. The predictions of RoBERTa were further fine-tuned by class-dependent-minority-class classifiers. A special classifier, which employs dynamically adapted Least Common Sub-sequence algorithm, is used to adapt to the intricacies of repetition class. Compared to the other participating systems, our submission is ranked 4th on the leaderboard.