About

Hi! I'm Varun Babbar, a PhD student in Machine Learning at Duke University, advised by Cynthia Rudin. Previously, I worked as an ML Researcher at JP Morgan London, where I developed machine learning methods to accelerate software development. This included methods to generate embeddings of repositories, designing systems based on large language models to automate code development, and code unit test quality assessment based on weakly supervised learning (no links here because these were internal projects).

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2022 with a BA + MEng in Information and Computer Engineering, ranking in the top 5% of my class. During my time at Cambridge, I've collaborated with Umang Bhatt and Adrian Weller on human-aligned uncertainty quantification and risk control, Sean Moran on federated learning for Covid-19 diagnosis, and Rafal Mantiuk on developing visual loss functions for image-to-image translation models.

My research focuses on making machine learning models more interpretable, reliable, and actionable in real-world settings. I develop methods that balance predictive performance with transparency, such as discrete optimization techniques for near-optimal models (ICML 2025 Oral, ICML 2026 Spotlight), interpretable uncertainty quantification aligned with human judgments (IJCAI Oral 2022, NeurIPS Workshop 2022), and diagnostic tools to understand distribution shifts between datasets (JMLR 2025). My work combines theoretical rigor with practical relevance, often inspired by challenges in healthcare, criminal justice, and perception. I'm especially interested in model selection under constraints, human-aligned evaluation, and data-centric ML.

More recently, I'm also interested in tabular foundation models and am currently exploring how to understand their inductive biases and make them more interpretable.

Here are the cities I've lived in (in chronological order):
New Delhi     Mumbai     Singapore     Mumbai     Cambridge     London     Durham, North Carolina     New York

I love playing basketball and squash: I was part of Cambridge's Varsity squash team. We toured a lot in and around Cambridgeshire, playing against county clubs and university teams alike. I'm still active in Duke's squash and basketball communities, though I only play for recreation.