Recognitions | Daniel P. Palomar

My former postdoc Sandeed Kumar promoted to Associate Professor at IIT Delhi

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Super proud of Sandeep Kumar for his promotion to Associate Professor at IIT Delhi!! 👏

Sandeep Kumar spent ~3 years (2017-2020) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a postdoc and I have very fond memories of his time here. We worked together on graph learning research and he collaborated with many other members of my research group (see https://www.danielppalomar.com/publications/). He left in 2020 when Covid was starting to hit strong everywhere. It is truly amazing to witness how fast he has grown as a faculty in IIT Delhi with his research group Machine Intelligence Signal and Network (MISN Lab), IIT Delhi. Congrats again to Sandeep!

My former PhD student Junxiao Song pushing the limits with DeepSeek

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we all know, DeepSeek has recently pushed the limits in LLMs through groundbreaking innovations. I’m proud to share that my former PhD student Junxiao Song serves as a Principal Researcher at DeepSeek AI, where he:

Proposed the novel reinforcement learning algorithm GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization), which has been applied to train nearly all models in the DeepSeek series, e.g., DeepSeek-R1.
Co-developed DeepSeek-V3 (671B param MoE) and DeepSeek-V2, achieving GPT-4 level performance at 1/10 training cost.
Created novel reinforcement learning pipelines in DeepSeek-R1, eliminating supervised fine-tuning needs.
Pioneered resource-efficient training enabling 671B parameter models with $5.5M compute budget.
Developed model distillation techniques producing state-of-the-art 7B/70B variants.
Led DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5 integrating Lean 4 for theorem proving.
Contributed to DeepSeek-Coder-V2 surpassing closed models in code intelligence.

His work has positioned DeepSeek as the first Chinese AI company to rival OpenAI’s most advanced models while overcoming U.S. semiconductor sanctions through optimized training on restricted NVIDIA H800 GPUs.

Google Scholar

See published news:

Paper award at Asilomar

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Yifan Yu has been awarded the Best Student Paper Award (Bronze) at the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers! 🎉

Our paper, titled “Robust and Constrained Estimation of State-Space Models: A Majorization-Minimization Approach,” introduces efficient methods for extending the Kalman filter to handle non-Gaussian observations—particularly useful in applications such as financial data analysis.

LinkedIn announcement

Yifan Yu, Shengjie Xiu, and Daniel P. Palomar, “Robust and Constrainted Estimation of State-Space Models: A Majorization-Minimization Approach,” in Proc. of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, 2024.