Aritro Shome

aritro shome

sortira / calcutta, india / ml research & systems

résumé blog github linkedin x youtube email everything else

hi, i am aritro, a cs/it undergrad at iiest shibpur and go by sortira on most of the internet. i work across machine learning research and engineering, and what i enjoy is taking systems apart to see how they actually work, whether that is a model or the infrastructure under it. lately i am reading my way into distributed systems, database internals and concurrency.

01 experience

research intern

7 months, mar 2026 – sep 2026

AI4Bharat, IIT Madras

  • investigating mechanistic interpretability and circuit tracing in SoTA open models (Gemma, Qwen) on reasoning tasks across modalities, languages and model scales, focused on vision-language models over Indic inputs.
  • ran 40,000+ instrumented forward passes for activation capture on multi-billion-parameter models under a hard 24 GB VRAM ceiling, with component-attribution scripts to isolate critical circuits before committing to full runs.
  • engineered a memory-efficient activation-patching framework: disabled fused and attention-kernel optimisations to expose per-layer activations, then managed the non-linear VRAM growth that followed.

stackPythonPyTorchHugging FaceCUDAmixed precisionLinux

ai engineer intern

4 months, aug 2025 – dec 2025

Sarvam AI, media & dubbing

  • built an automated evaluation framework for an NVIDIA lip-sync model; the pipeline caught and resolved a bug causing ~500% variance in output video file sizes.
  • redesigned the production dubbing pipeline, replacing brittle hard-coded prompt harnesses with modular YAML instruction blocks that let the model's chain-of-thought infer context. translation quality went up; i picked the final configuration by a/b test.

stackPythonYAMLdata pipelinesLLM APIsa/b testingGit

seepipeline in production (video)

02 selected work solo, with writeups

ForgeFormer

2026
  • hand-designed an interpretable 2-layer transformer that does two-digit addition with manually-set weights and no gradient descent, building attention and MLP computation from first principles to show exactly what each component contributes.

stackPythonPyTorchNumPy

seewriteupinteractive demo

seven deadly sins of Gemma

2026
  • replicated Anthropic's persona / emotion-vector methodology to extract a steering vector for each of the seven deadly sins in Gemma, on a single consumer GPU.
  • verified vector correctness through targeted steering and activation patching rather than eyeballing generations.

stackPythonPyTorchHugging FaceGemma

seewriteup

AlponaGen

oct 2025
  • built a modular Python engine that generates alpona, a Bengali folk art, through fractal-based layering, with an extensible OOP style-registration system.
  • published a 13,000-image synthetic dataset at 1024×1024 on Kaggle for generative-ai research.

stackPythonNumPyOOP design

seegithubdataset

some work with partner orgs is unpublished. more builds on the other page.

03 writing

silicognition.is-a.dev

longer writeups on solo projects, and notes from taking things apart.

04 education, awards & teaching more

education

  • b.tech in information technology, IIEST Shibpur 2024 to 2028 · cgpa 9.15 / 10
  • INSPIRE scholarship, government of india awarded to the top 1% of the higher-secondary cohort

selected awards

  • 1st at TensorQuest ml hackathon, Instruo 2025 100+ teams across india
  • 1st at Brain Dead ml hackathon, Revelation 2025 ~200 teams
  • 1st at the Prof. Brahma Prakash memorial paper presentation, IGCAR Kalpakkam 2023 · 500+ applicants · paper on ai/ml in materials research

teaching

  • ai/ml co-lead, Google Developer Groups on Campus, IIEST Shibpur ran sessions on deep learning and transformer architecture; mentored a junior into an internship