Chinmaya Kausik

QR @ Two Sigma | Prev ML PhD @ UMich, Intern @ Jane Street, Netflix, Microsoft | Silver @ International Linguistics Olympiad

New York City Metropolitan Area

About

I am a Quantitative Researcher in the news team at Two Sigma, working on developing trading signals and strategies using text data and LLMs. Prior to this, I was a PhD student in mathematics and machine learning, broadly working on sequential decision-making under partial observability. My research during my PhD ranged across reinforcement learning, bandits, RLHF, LLMs, LLM agents, causal inference, model predictive control and graph neural networks. I enjoy designing and implementing algorithms and methods that have strong real-world performance and are rooted in structured, generalizable ideas. Overall, my aim is to design and deploy principled methods for building AI solutions and agents that can assist with and/or improve upon human-level decision making in a safe and reliable fashion.

Experience

  • Quantitative Researcher at Two Sigma
    Jun 2026 - Present · 2 mos

    Working on the news team, developing trading signals and strategies using text data and LLMs.

  • University of Michigan (4 yrs 11 mos)
    • Graduate Student Researcher
      Apr 2022 - Jun 2026 · 4 yrs 3 mos

      Worked on projects in offline reinforcement learning, causal inference, double descent and denoising, using RL to improve GNN performance, latent bandits, multi-fidelity feedback, MDPs with partially observed rewards, etc Mentors and Collaborators: Ambuj Tewari (Michigan), Rishi Sonthalia (UCLA), Eli Meirom (NVIDIA), Yonathan Efroni (Meta), Aadirupa Saha (Apple), Nadav Merlis (ENSEA), Kevin Tan (Wharton), Aldo Pacchiano (Broad Institute), Kashvi Srivastava (Michigan).

    • Graduate Student Instructor
      Aug 2021 - Mar 2025 · 3 yrs 8 mos

      Sole instructor for a section of 15-20 students in Calculus 1 or 2 (Math 115/116) every semester.

  • Machine Learning Research Intern at Jane Street
    May 2025 - Aug 2025 · 4 mos

    - Developed methods to use text data to predict returns, tackling overfitting and memorization. Increased proof-of-concept R^2 by ~100%. - Designed, trained and researched foundation models for order data, discovering a consistent hierarchy in performance across architectures. - Implemented both manual and automatic trading strategies in simulated markets, tackling real issues like sim-to-prod alignment, outlier events, etc.

  • Machine Learning Research Intern at Netflix
    Feb 2025 - May 2025 · 4 mos

    Researched memory and retrieval mechanisms for LLMs under Adith Swaminathan and Nathan Kallus. - Designed a modular agentic memory workflow that can be plugged into any LLM agent for any task without manual-adaptation. Paper in preparation. - Demonstrated 5-10 percent gains in F-1 scores, accuracy and coverage over baselines across question-answering and code generation tasks, using only generic prompts. - Researched an optimizer workflow that can optimize parameters and prompts of a workflow based on its past runs, similar to the Trace workflow.

  • Data Science Intern at Microsoft
    Jun 2024 - Aug 2024 · 3 mos

    Working in the autobidding and ad monetization team under Ajith Moparthi. • Designed and implemented a novel algorithm for automated bidding in advertising auctions with hourly model updates, reducing latency from four days to one hour with a 44.5% error reduction. Paper in preparation. • Derived and documented a novel exact inference rule for multi‑task Gaussian processes using only dot product samples. • Wrote ∼2000 lines of code to be shipped to the team, with applications to three different team projects.