About Me
I am a student researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing focusing on LLM reasoning, and a computer science student at Johns Hopkins University specializing in NLP, AI, and ML.
Publications
SocialNLI: A Dialogue-Centric Social Inference DatasetPreprint
Deo, Akhil; Sanders, Kate; Van Durme, Benjamin
In: arXiv, 2025.
BibTeX
@misc{deo2025socialnlidialoguecentricsocialinference,
title={SocialNLI: A Dialogue-Centric Social Inference Dataset},
author={Akhil Deo and Kate Sanders and Benjamin Van Durme},
year={2025},
eprint={2510.05458},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05458},
}QAagent: A Multiagent System for Unit Test Generation via Natural Language Pseudocode (Student Abstract)Proceedings Article
Deo, Akhil
In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025.
BibTeX
@article{Deo_2025,
title={QAagent: A Multiagent System for Unit Test Generation via Natural Language Pseudocode (Student Abstract)},
volume={39},
url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/35246},
DOI={10.1609/aaai.v39i28.35246},
number={28},
journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
author={Deo, Akhil},
year={2025}, month={Apr.},
pages={29345-29347}
}Feasibility of Mobile Application for Surgical Robot TeleoperationProceedings Article
Deo, Akhil; Kazanzides, Peter
In: Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, pp. 121-122, 2023.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Deo2023,
series = {HSMR2023},
title = {Feasibility of Mobile Application for Surgical Robot Teleoperation},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.31256/HSMR2023.63},
DOI = {10.31256/hsmr2023.63},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 15th Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics 2023},
publisher = {The Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London London, UK},
author = {Deo, Akhil and Kazanzides, Peter},
year = {2023},
month = jun,
collection = {HSMR2023}
}Projects
Transparent Reasoning with Large Language Models (Advisor: Dr. Benjamin Van Durme)
Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing
September 2024 – Present
- Researched social natural language inference (NLI) to improve how LLMs interpret elements like sarcasm, humor, and irony.
- Created SocialNLI, the first dialogue-centric social-inference dataset, comprising 243 Friends TV transcripts, 5.3K generated inferences, and a 1.4K human-annotated eval split - grounding theory-of-mind reasoning in sarcasm and irony.
- Developed efficient counterfactual-reasoning pipeline to assign calibrated plausibility scores to social inferences, surfacing latent LLM failure modes in social reasoning, using PyTorch, vLLM, Huggingface, and Langchain.
- Constructed taxonomy of language model failure modes on dialogue-centric data.
- Leveraging token-level and rubric-based rewards to enhance reasoning processes in LLMs using reinforcement learning.
Nuss Bar (Advisor: Peter Kazanzides)
Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
February 2024 - July 2024
- Creating desktop planning and visualization app to aid clinicians in shaping bar for Nuss Procedure, used to correct Pectus Excavatum
- Conceiving user study comparing efficacy of Nuss bar prototypes shown in augmented reality vs. 3D printed bars
- Created an augmented reality workflow to aid clinicians in performing Nuss procedure, potentially impacting 1000+ Pectus Excavatum surgeries annually, using Unity, C#, Python, Slicer3D, and MRTK3.
SurgiSimulate (Advisor: Peter Kazanzides)
Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
February 2022 - July 2023
- Enabled remote surgical training by turning an iPhone into a hand-held controller for the dVRK surgical robot (Swift/Obj-C and ARKit).
- Constructed a mobile application using Swift and Objective C to control a da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK)
- Leveraged ARKit to capture transformation of mobile devices and ROS and Python for robot control
- Designed and ran a user study with 16 participants to compare performance of mobile app with existing input devices, validating feasibility for mobile teleoperation and remote surgical training.
- Presented research at the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics
Work Experience
Software Development Engineering Intern
Amazon Web Services
May 2025 - August 2025
- Designed and built a recording system capturing user interactions in browser and automatically generates reproducible workflow, improving automation accuracy by 20% and eliminating manual workflow design, using TypeScript and Python.
Technical Advisor Intern - GenAI
Scale AI
November 2024 - February 2025
- Solved Olympiad-level competitive programming (CP) problems that only ~25% of competitive programmers can solve, to support training a code-reasoning LLM.
- Crafted specialized prompts enabling LLMs to solve Olympiad-level competitive programming problems.
Software Development Engineering Intern
Amazon AGI
May 2024 - August 2024
- Devised and developed multi-agent small language model (SLM) frameworks to enhance LLMs' advanced planning abilities using Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude. Achieved a 220% increase over baseline on the TravelPlanner dataset.
- Implemented an evaluation pipeline for multi-agent experiments with RxJava and Python, speeding up evaluations by 400%.
Founding Engineer
Quantable.io
December 2023 - July 2024
- Constructed the site's PostgreSQL database schemas and created efficient APIs in Node.js, a custom LaTeX rendering library, admin tools, and production-ready RBAC system, to serve 1,200+ quant finance problems for 2,500+ users.
Software Engineering Intern
PayPal
May 2023 - August 2023
- Redesigned monetary transactions API with an eventually consistent data strategy, caching transactions in a local database to eliminate multiple mid-tier API calls for 100,000+ daily transactions.
- Improved API performance, reducing latency by ~100ms per API call, leveraging Java, Spring Boot, and SQL.
Course Assistant
Johns Hopkins University
August 2022 - December 2025
- Taught and evaluated 200+ students for 3 classes: AI, Data Structures and Object Oriented Software Engineering.
Achievements
- Pistritto Fellowship
- JHU Machine Learning Best Project Award
- Pava Center for Entrepreneurship Ignite Award
- JHU Whiting School of Engineering Undergraduate Conference Travel Grant
- JHU Student Sponsorship Initiative Award
- Ongoing Venture Prize and Most Creative Use of Twilio at HopHacks Fall 2021