Hi, I'm Sruthi! I love thinking about how language models actually learn — and how we can make them learn what we want. Now at Amazon AGI, working on post-training for the Nova foundation models. My Ph.D. at IISc Bangalore (with Prof. Anand Louis) explored algorithms with provable fairness guarantees.

LLM post-trainingreinforcement learningfairnessrankingoptimization
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Sruthi Gorantla
Latest from the notebook

Why We Divide by n − 1

Understanding sample variance as an optimization problem, and why estimating the mean guarantees we underestimate the true variance.

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News

  • May 2025 Defended my PhD thesis, "Mitigating Bias via Algorithms with Fairness Guarantees," at IISc Bangalore.
  • Apr 2025 Joined Amazon AGI as an Applied Scientist on the Foundation Modeling team.
  • Jun 2024 Recipient of the Microsoft Research India PhD Award.
  • Oct 2023 Gave seminars on fairness in ranking at Georgia Tech, Harvard, Dartmouth, UMD, Google, and UC Santa Barbara.
  • Jun 2023 Research intern at INRIA Saclay, Paris (FairPlay team).

Publications

LLM Post-Training

  1. SPARK: Stepwise Process-Aware Rewards for Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning.
    Salman Rahman, Sruthi Gorantla, Arpit Gupta, Swastik Roy, Nanyun Peng, Yang Liu.
    Under submission
  2. The Role of Preference Data and Unembeddings in the Convergence Rate of DPO.
    Gayathri Chandran, Sai Soumya Nalli, Sruthi Gorantla, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis.
    ARLET Workshop, NeurIPS 2025
  3. Split-Merge: Scalable and Memory-Efficient Merging of Expert LLMs.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Aditya Rawal, Devamanyu Hazarika, Kaixiang Lin, Mingyi Hong, Mahdi Namazifar.
    EMNLP 2025

Fairness in Ranking

  1. Pairwise Sample Complexity for Fair Active Ranking with Cascaded Norm Objectives.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Sara Ahmadian.
    KDD 2025
  2. Optimizing Group-Fair Plackett-Luce Ranking Models for Relevance and Ex-Post Fairness.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Eshaan Bhansali, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis.
    SIGIR 2024 · code
  3. Sampling Individually-Fair Rankings that are Always Group-Fair.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Anay Mehrotra, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis.
    AIES 2023
  4. Sampling Ex-Post Group-Fair Rankings.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis.
    IJCAI 2023 · code
  5. On the Problem of Underranking in Group-Fair Ranking.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis.
    ICML 2021 · code

Fairness in Clustering

  1. Socially Fair Center-Based and Linear Subspace Clustering.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Kishen N. Gowda, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis.
    ECML-PKDD 2023 · code

AI for Healthcare

  1. Increasing Impact of Mobile Health Programs: SAHELI for Maternal and Child Care.
    Shresth Verma, Gargi Singh, Aditya Mate, Paritosh Verma, Sruthi Gorantla, Neha Madhiwalla, Aparna Hegde, Divy Thakkar, Manish Jain, Milind Tambe, Aparna Taneja.
    IAAI 2023 (Best Innovative Application Award)
  2. Multi-disease Predictive Analytics: A Clinical Knowledge-aware Approach.
    Lin Qiu, Sruthi Gorantla, Vaibhav Rajan, Bernard C. Y. Tan.
    ACM TMIS 2021

Sentiment Analysis & NLP

  1. CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums.
    Devamanyu Hazarika, Soujanya Poria, Sruthi Gorantla, Erik Cambria, Roger Zimmermann, Rada Mihalcea.
    COLING 2018
  2. Self-Attentive Feature-level Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Detection.
    Devamanyu Hazarika, Sruthi Gorantla, Soujanya Poria, Roger Zimmermann.
    MIPR 2018
  3. Aspect-Sentiment Embeddings for Company Profiling and Employee Opinion Mining.
    Devamanyu Hazarika, Rajiv Bajpai, Kunal Singh, Sruthi Gorantla, Erik Cambria, Roger Zimmermann.
    CICLing 2018

Miscellaneous

  1. Biologically Plausible Neural Networks via Evolutionary Dynamics and Dopaminergic Plasticity.
    Sruthi Gorantla, Anand Louis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Santosh Vempala, Naganand Yadati.
    NeurIPS Workshop 2020

Awards

  • 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Award, KDD 2025
  • 2024 Microsoft Research India PhD Award
  • 2021 Google PhD Fellowship in Algorithms, Optimizations, and Markets

Education

  • 2018 – 2025 Ph.D., Computer Science, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. Advisor: Prof. Anand Louis.
  • 2016 – 2018 M.S., Computer Science, Computer Science and Automation (CSA), IISc Bangalore.
  • 2012 – 2016 B.Tech., Computer Science, NIT Warangal.