Mohammad Aflah Khan

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)

Research Software Engineer • April, 2024 — Present [Full Time] | Nov, 2023 — March, 2024 [Part time] | Aug, 2023 — Oct, 2023 [Intern]

Working under Dr Krishna Gummadi to explore different aspects of LLMs. Some areas we've explored/are exploring are

• Optimizing pre-training and inference for LLMs
• LLM memorization and the impact of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) on memorization
• Knowledge acquisition and evaluation of factual knowledge in LLMs
• Built and currently maintain key internal tools OpenChat (An internal chatbot), MaxCast (A research paper-to-podcast conversion service) & MaxChat (A document-based chat service). These services were developed from scratch, including hosting models on-premises and fine-tuning for optimal performance.
• Published and submitted research to top-tier (A*) conferences

EleutherAI

Open Source Contributor • Dec, 2022 — Present

Currently working on the Multilingual Natural Instructions project to build a massive instruction tuning corpus for Hindi. Previously worked on -

• Pythia - A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling (Accepted ICML'23) - Majorly contributed to the gender bias evals and intervention case study. The models have over 18 million downloads (as of April 2025)
• Recite, Reconstruct, Recollect - Memorization in LMs as a Multifaceted Phenomenon (Accepted ICLR'25) - An intuitive taxonomy to classify memorized sequences and then build predictors based on these classes

Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2)

Undergraduate Student Researcher • June, 2021 — May, 2024

I've worked on a variety of projects, from hate speech normalization to designing recommendations for fine-tuning improved hate speech detectors. I also led the QUENCH project, a benchmark aimed at evaluating advanced reasoning abilities in large language models, with a particular emphasis on Indic contexts.

Goldman Sachs

Summer Analyst • May, 2023 — July, 2023

Worked in the Finance, Planning & Analysis Engineering division towards revamping the central hub of the department. Also built POCs based on user feedback to improve the search and access experience on the webapp. Also recieved a return offer to join full time as an Analyst.

Google Summer of Code - TensorFlow

Open Source Developer • May, 2022 — Sept, 2022

Worked with Matthew Watson & Chen Qian towards adding support for data augmentation layers to KerasNLP a library under the Keras/TensorFlow Ecosystem which aims to build industry oriented NLP Solutions. I also contributed to several bug fixes and other utilities such as tokenizers and transformer encoder & decoder.

An Overview of AlphaFold

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS (Internal Paper Reading Group) • February, 2026

[Paper Reading & Discussion] Metadata Conditioning Accelerates Language Model Pre-training (MeCo)

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS (Internal Paper Reading Group) • September, 2025

[Talk] LLMs at Scale

Max Planck Computing and Data Facility: MPCDF (AI Kick-off Workshop) • April, 2025

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (Hosted by Florian Marquardt) • April, 2025

[Talk] An Overview of DeepSeek-{V3/R1}

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS (Part of AI, Computing & Society Initiative) • February, 2025

[Talk] Democratizing and Accelerating Research with LLMs: Making Science More Accessible Whilst Finding Interesting Research Problems

Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy: MPI-SP (Hosted by Meeyoung Cha) • December, 2024

[Demo + Lightning Talk] Empowering Research with Open-Access LLMs: From Tools to Copilots

AI, Computing & Society Initiative Launch Event (At Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS) • December, 2024

[Paper Reading & Discussion] Lookback Lens: Detecting and Mitigating Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models Using Only Attention Maps

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS (Internal Paper Reading Group) • July, 2024

[Paper Reading & Discussion] Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS (Internal Paper Reading Group) • May, 2024

[Talk] Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems: MPI-SWS (Hosted by Krishna Gummadi) • July, 2023

Goldman Sachs (Internal NLP/IR Reading Group) • June, 2023

The First Workshop on Large Language Model Memorization (L2M2) @ ACL'25

Program Committee Member • 2025

ACL Rolling Review (ARR), International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS)

Served as a reviewer for the above mentioned conferences • 2023 Onwards

FIRE HASOC Task 3: Identification of Tokens Contributing to Explicit Hate in Text by Span Detection

Organizer • 2023

19th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)

Volunteer • 2022

• Teaching Assistant - Machine Learning under Dr. Anubha Gupta
• Teaching Assistant - Data Structures and Algorithms under Dr. Piyus Kedia

Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-D)

B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering • 2020 — 2024

• Dean's List for Academic Excellence (2022-23)
• Dean's List for Innovation in Research and Development (2022-23)
• Dean's List for Academic Excellence (2021-22)

GPA - 9.63/10 [Dept. Rank 2 & Batch Rank 3]

Featured in the EleutherAI Community Spotlight

EleutherAI • September, 2023

Selected for Amazon ML Summer School

Amazon • 2022

All India Rank 491

JEE Mains Paper 2 • 2020

Top 0.66 Percentile

JEE Mains Paper 1 • 2020

All India Rank 130

Undegraduate Entrance Examination (UGEE) • 2020

• Chess
• Webtoons, Mangas, Manhwas, Manhuas and Anime