Sarath Shekkizhar, Ph.D.
Staff Research Scientist at Salesforce
Education
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
Aug 2017 - May 2023University of Southern California
GPA: 3.93
Advisor: Antonio Ortega
M.S. in Computer Science
Aug 2017 - May 2022University of Southern California
GPA: 4.0
M.S. in Electrical Engineering (Computer Vision, Machine Learning)
Aug 2012 - Dec 2013University of Southern California
GPA: 3.86
B.Tech. in Electronics and Communication
July 2008 - June 2012National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli
GPA: 9.12
Work Experience
Staff Research Scientist
Oct 2024 - PresentSalesforce
San Francisco, CA
Working on foundational research on (multi) agentic systems and LLM training for improved reasoning and alignment. I continue to spend some of my research time on aspects of voice AI and agentic design for applied research.
Member of Technical Staff
June 2023 - October 2024Tenyx (Acq. by Salesforce)
Los Altos, CA
Part of the founding team at Tenyx building Voice AI for customer support. Was primarily focused on research and algorithms for various aspects of voice agents. Key accomplishments include research on continual learning, building TenyxChat series of models, and geometric characterization of LLMs. Was also involved in product development, particularly in endpointing, audio disambiguation, and agent governance.
Research Intern
Sep 2022 - Dec 2022Sunnyvale, CA
Worked on understanding the impact of input data used in training graph models and scalable sampling approaches to improve semi-supervised graph learning. Preliminary experiments with proposed graph learning showed 3x increased recall in abuse detection. Host: Mohamed Farghal, Animesh Nandi, Behavior Protections, Counter-Abuse Technology.
Software Engineer 2
Mar 2014 - Oct 2016KLA Tencor
Milpitas, CA
Designed and developed tools to classify and visualize defect modulations for Process Window Qualification in wafer fabrication. Also, implemented and co-owned components for analysis and classification using decision trees and random forests.
Publications
23 publications. View all →
Interaction Theater: A case of LLM Agents Interacting at Scale
S Shekkizhar, A Earle, arXiv Preprints, 2026
Echoing: Identity Failures when LLM Agents Talk to Each Other
S Shekkizhar, R Cosentino, A Earle, S Savarese, arXiv Preprints, 2025
Convergence dynamics of Agent-to-Agent Interactions with Misaligned objectives
R Cosentino, S Shekkizhar, A Earle, arXiv Preprints, 2025
AGI Is Coming... Right After AI Learns to Play Wordle
S Shekkizhar, R Cosentino, arXiv Preprints, 2025
Out-of-Distribution Detection through Soft Clustering with Non-Negative Kernel Regression
A. Gulati, X. Dong, C. Hurtado, S. Shekkizhar, S. Swayamdipta, A. Ortega, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2024
Patents
Knowledge base for voice large language model applications
ProvisionalUS63752613 • Filed: January 2025
Gradient-free optimization of large language models
ProvisionalUS63752618 • Filed: January 2025
Machine learning model compression
ProvisionalUS18905761 • Filed: October 2024
Training a target activation sparsity in a neural network
PendingUS18802235 • Filed: August 2024
Domain aware large language model governance
PendingUS18745562 • Filed: June 2024
Fine-tuning machine learning models while retraining accumulated knowledge
PendingUS18496698 • Filed: October 2023
Data sampling using Locality Sensitive Hashing for large scale graph learning
GrantedUS63517869 • Filed: August 2023
Optimizing training sets used for setting up inspection-related algorithms
GrantedUS10267748 • Filed: April 2019
Awards & Honors
- •IEEE Rising Star in Signal Processing - ICASSP 2023
- •IEEE Best Student Paper Award - ICIP 2020
- •Ming-Hsieh Ph.D. Scholar Finalist 2022-23
Academic Activities
- •Reviewer: IEEE Journals (JSAIT, TSIPN, SPL, TNNLS)
- •Reviewer: Conferences (ICASSP, ICLR, NeurIPS, LoG, ICML)