I am a third-year CS PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Emma Pierson.

I develop AI and NLP methods for problems in the social sciences, healthcare, and biology. Recently, I’m most excited about interpreting foundation models for hypothesis generation. I am also interested in evaluating and improving the social impacts of AI.

I started my PhD at Cornell Tech, where I was a member of the AI, Policy, and Practice working group and a Digital Life Initiative fellow. Before my PhD, I studied CS at MIT, with minors in Biology and Women’s & Gender Studies. I worked with Catherine D’Ignazio, Michael Carbin, and Anshul Kundaje.

I write sporadically on my blog and on Substack. I am grateful to all the mentors and collaborators who have helped me along the way; if I can be helpful, feel free to email me.

Recently:

Selected Work

Sparse Autoencoders for Hypothesis Generation.
Rajiv Movva*, Kenny Peng*, Nikhil Garg, Jon Kleinberg, Emma Pierson.
ICML 2025.
[paper] [demo] [code] [pip install] [bluesky]

Annotation alignment: Comparing LLM and human annotations of conversational safety.
Rajiv Movva, Pang Wei Koh, Emma Pierson.
EMNLP 2024.
[paper] [twitter]

Coarse race data conceals disparities in clinical risk score performance.
Rajiv Movva*, Divya Shanmugam*, Kaihua Hou, Priya Pathak, John Guttag, Nikhil Garg, Emma Pierson.
MLHC 2023 (Proceedings) & ML4H 2023 (Findings).
🏆 Honorable Mention, Best Findings Paper 🏆, ML4H 2023.
[paper] [twitter] [code] [Cornell news] [New York Times]

Topics, Authors, and Institutions in Large Language Model Research: Trends from 17K arXiv Papers.
Rajiv Movva*, Sidhika Balachandar*, Kenny Peng*, Gabriel Agostini*, Nikhil Garg, Emma Pierson.
NAACL 2024.
[paper] [twitter] [code] [Data Skeptic podcast]

Towards Intersectional, Feminist, Participatory ML: A Case Study in Supporting Feminicide Counterdata Collection.
Harini Suresh, Rajiv Movva, Amelia Dogan, Rahul Bhargava, Isadora Cruxên, Ángeles Martinez Cuba, Giulia Taurino, Wonyoung So, Catherine D’Ignazio.
FAccT 2022.
🏆 Best Student Paper 🏆
[paper] [twitter]

Dissecting Lottery Ticket Transformers: Structural and Behavorial Study of Sparse Neural Machine Translation.
Rajiv Movva and Jason Zhao.
BlackboxNLP @ EMNLP 2020.
🏆 Best Paper 🏆
[paper] [twitter] [slides]

Deciphering regulatory DNA sequences and noncoding genetic variants using neural network models of massively parallel reporter assays.
Rajiv Movva, Peyton Greenside, Georgi K Marinov, Surag Nair, Avanti Shrikumar, Anshul Kundaje.
PLoS ONE, 2019.
[paper] [twitter]


Website forked from this repo.