Sarvesh Tiku

I'm a senior studying computer science at Georgia Tech, graduating in May 2027. I work on AI safety: understanding what language models represent internally, evaluating them where mistakes are expensive, and building tools that let people oversee AI agents before they act.

I'm currently a research assistant with SPAR, studying how language models represent time. I completed the Technical AI Safety Fellowship at Harvard's AI Safety Student Team and have facilitated BlueDot Impact's Technical AI Safety course. At Salesforce, I built evaluation and replay infrastructure for a production AI agent, and before that I did research at Georgia Tech's Financial Services Innovation Lab and the Weigel Lab.

Sarvesh Tiku

News

Research

I'm interested in interpretability, especially how models represent and update beliefs over time, and in evaluating LLMs in settings where being wrong is expensive, like finance and science.

Decodable, Steerable, but Used? Auditing a Latent Risk Direction in Financial Language Models

Sarvesh Tiku

IAFM'26: Interpretability & Alignment of Financial Models, Workshop at ACM ICAIF, 2026  project page paper

Learning Time Before Trusting It: Auditing Recognition–Decision Consistency in a Typed Financial Decision Model

Sarvesh Tiku, Gauri Sharma

ACM ICAIF Workshop on Financial AI Security, Safety, and Privacy, 2026  project page paper

Interpretable by Construction, Identifiable by Construction: Privacy Leakage of Shapelet-Based Anti-Money-Laundering Models

Sarvesh Tiku, Gauri Sharma

ACM ICAIF Workshop on Financial AI Security, Safety, and Privacy, 2026  project page paper

Belief State: Interpreting Temporal Belief Dynamics in Agentic Financial Systems

Sarvesh Tiku

ICLR 2026 Workshop on Advances in Financial AI, 2026  code scholar

Benchmarking LLMs for Trustworthy Multimedia Retrieval in Computational Biology Using Structured Zotero Graphs

Sarvesh Tiku

IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR), 2025  project page paper

Mitigation of User-Prompt Bias in Large Language Models: A Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning Based Framework

Sarvesh Tiku

IEEE International Conference on Computing and Machine Intelligence (ICMI), 2024  project page paper

Blog

Notes on systems, trading infrastructure, and ML. Read the blog →

September 2026 Threading my trading engine didn't make it faster Splitting Pulse across three threads halved its throughput. Cache lines, batching, and what threading bought instead. September 2026 When routing on cache locality backfires Sending LLM requests to the server with their prompt cached cut latency 81%, until one worker took all the traffic.

Projects

CachePilot: KV-cache-aware routing for LLM inference

Python, FastAPI, asyncio, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, React, TypeScript, Docker

Routes requests to the worker that already holds their prompt prefix in cache, trading locality against load. In simulation it cut median time to first token by 81% and raised throughput 18% over round robin, and reproduced the failure mode where pure cache affinity overloads a single worker.

SwarmGuard: minimal-intervention containment for multi-agent AI systems

Python, Streamlit, sentence-transformers, Parquet, Docker  demo write-up

Reconstructs how an error or unsafe behavior may have spread between agents from their execution traces, as a time-respecting graph of agents, messages, and shared resources. It then scores candidate controls (blocking a channel, restricting writes, isolating an agent) by how much inferred spread they would have prevented against collateral disruption to benign activity. On a 20.5k-event wiki swarm, restricting writes to one relay page removed 97% of inferred paths at about 0% collateral. Built at the AI Swarm Dynamics Hackathon (AI Village × Grove Research).

Quorum: consensus-gated actions for AI agents

Python

Several models vote on an agent's proposed action before it runs, and anything without consensus is rolled back. Includes SDK integrations and failure injection tests to measure what the gate catches.

Pulse: a low-latency market data, execution, and risk engine

C++20, Linux

Ingests a binary UDP feed, recovers lost packets over TCP, rebuilds order books, and runs strategies through pre-trade risk into a simulated exchange, with deterministic record and replay. Order book updates take 10–13 ns with zero heap allocations; the threaded SPSC pipeline has p50 0.92 µs and p99 1.6 µs latency at 1M msgs/s. Threading did not raise throughput over the single-threaded version, which I think is the most useful thing it taught me.

Airlock: context integrity for coding agents

Node.js, Python and TypeScript SDKs, Linear API  demo

An agent can check its context, plan, and then act after a human has changed the rules. Airlock treats that as a time-of-check to time-of-use bug. Each agent gets a versioned lease on the facts it was given, and a deterministic gate re-checks freshness, consistency, provenance, authority, and conflicts with other agents right before any consequential action. Agents whose context goes stale are paused, and denied actions never run. An LLM reviewer can flag problems but can never override a denial.

Solar Surfers: ML solar siting and yield prediction for Colorado

Python, pvlib, scikit-learn, pandas, JavaScript  demo

Helps Colorado homeowners decide whether rooftop solar is worth it: for any address it estimates generation, forecast confidence, and 25-year financial value from 19 years of hourly weather at 150 sites. The day-ahead forecaster reaches 7.5% hourly RMSE (R² 0.94) on held-out 2024 and 7.7% at sites never seen in training. Built during the Computing for Good fellowship at Colorado School of Mines.

Flight Delay Prediction

Python, XGBoost, TensorFlow, Flask, React, Docker, Google Cloud Run

Delay prediction from 6M+ flights joined with weather data; compared XGBoost, random forests, MLPs, and RNNs.

Tracking Rare Earth Elements in Acid Mine Drainage

Python, C++ (pybind11), pandas, NumPy, ArcGIS, spatial interpolation

Hyperspectral imagery, field samples, and stream flow records combined to screen 25+ legacy mine sites for rare earth enrichment.

Experience

Sep 2026 – PresentResearch Assistant, SPAR
May 2026 – Aug 2026Software Engineering Intern, SalesforceRoot cause analysis agent for Sev-1 incidents and its replay evaluation harness.
Aug 2025 – May 2026ML Research Assistant, Financial Services Innovation Lab, Georgia Tech
May 2025 – Aug 2025Software Engineering Intern, SalesforceMulti-tenant load testing platform for AI agents at 100K+ concurrent requests.
Jan 2025 – Nov 2025Research Assistant, Weigel Lab, Georgia Tech
May 2024 – Jul 2024Computing for Good Fellow, Colorado School of Mines

Teaching & Service

AI safetyCompleted the Technical AI Safety Fellowship, Harvard AI Safety Student Team (May 2024 – Aug 2024), and involved with the AI Safety Initiative (AISI) at Georgia Tech.
FacilitatingFacilitator for the Technical AI Safety course, BlueDot Impact (Jan 2025 – Aug 2025)
WorkshopsAI/ML Workshop Lead, Big Data Big Impact. Hands-on PyTorch and ML workshops for 100+ students.
ClubsHead of Market Insights, Trading at Georgia Tech
StartupsFellowship Director, Startup Exchange