About Me

Portrait of Deepon Halder
Upcoming Spring SWE Intern @ Cisco
UG @ IIEST Shibpur

deeponh.2004@gmail.com
Github
Google Scholar
LinkedIn


I am from India 🇮🇳. I will be joining Cisco as a Software Engineering Intern this spring. My work centers on software engineering and machine-learning systems, with experience across speech, multilingual NLP, and language models. Previously, I worked at Cisco, Approximate Labs, and AI4Bharat, IIT Madras. I am also known as neuralnets. Feel free to contact me for any queries.

News

2026 2025

Publications

2026


Preferences of a Voice-First Nation: Large-Scale Pairwise Evaluation and Preference Analysis for TTS in Indian Languages

Srija Anand, Ashwin Sankar, Ishvinder Sethi, Aaditya Pareek, Kartik Rajput, Gaurav Yadav, Nikhil Narasimhan, Adish Pandya, Deepon Halder, Mohammed Safi Ur Rahman Khan, Praveen S V, Shobhit Banga, Mitesh M Khapra.

INTERSPEECH 2026: Main Conference

Top-b: Entropic Regulation of Relative Probability Bands in Autoregressive Language Processes

Deepon Halder, Raj Dabre.

Preprint

Multilingual TinyStories: A Synthetic Combinatorial Corpus of Indic Children's Stories for Training Small Language Models

Deepon Halder, Angira Mukherjee.

Preprint

Not All Time Is Gregorian: Evaluating LLMs on Cultural Calendar Systems

Deepon Halder, Adish Pandya, Raj Dabre.

ICBINB Workshop @ICLR 2026

Scripts Through Time: A Survey of the Evolving Role of Transliteration in NLP

Thanmay Jayakumar, Deepon Halder, Raj Dabre.

ACL Findings 2026

2025


RiddleBench: A New Generative Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Deepon Halder, Alan Saji, Thanmay Jayakumar, Raj Dabre, Ratish Puduppully, Anoop Kunchukuttan.

EACL Findings 2026

CycleDistill: Bootstrapping Machine Translation using LLMs with Cyclical Distillation

Deepon Halder, Thanmay Jayakumar, Raj Dabre.

MELT Workshop @ COLM 2025 / WAT @ IJCNLP-AACL 2025

A Comprehensive Survey of Data Poisoning Attacks

Deepon Halder, Anshika Gupta, Diya Ghosh, Hafizur Rehman.

Survey Paper


Projects

PaperCode : a practice platform for implementing machine-learning papers, validating ideas with tests, tracking progress, and preparing for ML roles

solAcc : a company-specific online-assessment practice platform with MCQs, coding labs, puzzles, and interview preparation

solving ML papers : from-scratch implementations of research papers and core machine-learning ideas

neugrad : Built a lightweight autograd engine in Python and NumPy, with tensor operations, automatic differentiation, backpropagation, and a scalable design for deep learning, mimicking PyTorch for education and experimentation.

Experience

Intern : Alma Inc. [Sept 2026 - Present] · Working on improving ASR models

Intern : Approximate Labs [July 2026 - Sept 2026] · Worked on reinforcement-learning research

Technical Intern : Cisco [May 2026 - July 2026] · Built testing infrastructure for router-software mock validation and automated internal engineering workflows

Research Intern : AI4Bharat, IIT Madras [Jan 2025 - Apr 2026] · Worked with Dr. Raj Dabre on multilingual NLP, transliteration, and low-resource language modeling

Research Intern : IIT Bhubaneswar [Dec 2024 - Jan 2025]

Research Apprentice : IIEST Shibpur [July 2024 - Sept 2024]


Academic Service

EMNLP 2025 · COLM 2025 · ACL 2026 · EMNLP 2026 · NeurIPS Ethics Review 2026

Events and Achievements over Time

Winner - Cody Challenge 2025 : Finished a month long course on MATLAB, and won the Cody Challenge at the end by solving 20/20 problems in the contest

Winner - Braindead Hackathon : Won 1st prize at this hackathon by building a finetuned Mistral 7B to summarize texts

1st Runners Up - MCode Metallum : Coded up a modern to-do app and won 2nd prize

1st Runners Up - Startup Challenge @ IIEST: Made a project Auto@Kol, which aimed to connect the auto-rickshaw framework efficiently in Kolkata

2nd Runners Up - Hacknovare Instruo : Coded up a mental health management app and won the 3rd prize

Cohere ML School 2025 : Got selected - couldn't attend due to previous engagements

The Residency Feb 2025 : Got selected in the Bangalore Cohort of The Residency - didn't go

KVPY 2021 SA : Extra Merit List Scholar

JBNSTS Scholar : Selected in top 250 students in West Bengal


Talks & Podcasts

Talks or Podcasts I have done



If you can’t explain something to a first-year student, then you haven’t really understood it.
— R. Feynman