Hi! I am a second year PhD student at Cornell University, advised by Prof. Tanya Goyal. I'm gratefully supported by an NSF GFRP Fellowship.
My research is in Natural Language Processing. At the moment, I am interested in empirical methods to improve our understanding of LMs. In the past, I also worked on continual learning and model editing for LMs.
I obtained my undergraduate degree at UT Austin, where I was first introduced to NLP. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Eunsol Choi, Prof. Greg Durrett, and Prof. Richard Tsai.
Publications
- Propagating Knowledge Updates to LMs Through Distillation. NeurIPS, 2023
Shankar Padmanabhan, Yasumasa Onoe, Michael J.Q. Zhang, Greg Durrett, Eunsol Choi.
- Can LMs Learn New Entities from Descriptions? Challenges in Propagating Injected Knowledge. ACL, 2023. Yasumasa Onoe, Michael J.Q. Zhang, Shankar Padmanabhan, Greg Durrett, Eunsol Choi.
Preprints
- Optimal Placement of Public Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Using Deep Reinforcement Learning. arXiv, 2021. Shankar Padmanabhan*, Aidan Petratos*, Allen Ting*, Kristina Zhou, Dylan Hageman, Jesse Pisel, Michael Pyrcz.
Hobbies
In my free time, I am passionate about learning languages. Through a small amount of "supervised training" (Duolingo) and a large amount of "unsupervised training" (native media), I have become a fluent speaker of Spanish, and I am learning French and Tamil as well.
Additionally, I enjoy ultimate frisbee and calisthenics. I played for UT's ultimate frisbee team as an undergrad, and am currently working towards a one arm pull up and a full front lever hold.