Kausthubh Manda

I’m Kausthubh Manda, a final year Integrated MTech student at IIIT Bangalore. I’m an aspiring researcher interested in the intersection of Mathematics and Machine Learning. My specific interests include ML theory, Reinforcement Learning, Optimisation, and LLMs. I’m currently a member of Dr. Aswin Kannan’s research group, working on Multi-Objective Optimization Theory as part of my Master’s thesis.

I’m currently working as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research India, under the supervision of Dr. Akshay Nambi, working on long-horizon memory for agents in the M365 stack.

I also work with Dr. Naganand Yadati, studying how LLMs retain prior capabilities when they are sequentially fine-tuned on new tasks. We probe the stability-plasticity trade-off, measuring how much general instruction-following and reasoning degrades as task-specific SFT proceeds. The goal is to characterise when and why standard fine-tuning pipelines forget, and what minimal interventions slow that drift.

I also play football (soccer, for my American friends) as a hobby. Apart from that, I enjoy exploring low-level programming principles. I’m the founder of MathClub@IIITB, where I organise math-themed events and have submitted a solution to the American Mathematical Monthly (more in the pipeline).