Applied AI researcher
Hi :) I'm DhruviI teach small models to do big things
I study reward design in reinforcement learning to teach small language models to call tools correctly. At JioHotstar, I build applied AI for real users.
Selected research · first authorPaper ↗
Teaching small models to call toolsBefore training
6.1%
After RL training
71.1%
0%100%
Qwen2.5-3B · 1,000 held-out examples · tool-call accuracy
Best Researcher AwardComputer Science
NMIMS · 2026Dean's Student ListCertificate of Merit
Top 10% of students
NMIMS · 2026Dean's Student ListCertificate of Merit
Top 10% of students
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About
What happens if I try?
Underlined links open more
2022Beginner
I didn't know how to code
2023Getting started
First Python projectAI/ML internship at Databyte: multi-camera CCTV tracking
2024Discovering research
First research paperResearch head, campus IEEE Robotics & Automation SocietyCCTV work became a paper
2025AI researcher arc
Paper on taking SLMs from 6.1% to 71.1% on tool use using GRPO ↗Fashion AI: actionable style recommendations ↗ADTS: crime detection and tracking ↗AI/ML internship at PshPyi LabsBuilt a news recommender on KubernetesJoined JioHotstar
2026Applied AI arc
Graduated from NMIMSText-to-SQL chatbot, 96% accurateCloud costs: 4 days → 5 minHR coach + sales agentAI cricket commentaryPromoted to Senior Executive, Data Science & Analytics
These days, most of my work comes down to two things:
onegetting small models to do more than people expect
twomaking sure the AI I build still holds up once real users get their hands on it
4 AI research papersExplore the work ↓
6.1% → 71.1%SLM tool calls with GRPO
61% vs 43%Seasonal colour
0.69 MAECross-domain recommendations
83 FPSReal-time tracking
Small models + RL
71.1% from 6.1%
beforeafter GRPO
A strict reward taught a 3B model to call tools, on one T4 GPU.
Read the paper →Text-to-SQL · JioHotstar
12 seasons
Ask a sports question and it writes the SQL, across Pro Kabaddi in five languages and ball-by-ball T20.
See the project →RAG + agents
2 agents
An HR coach that answers from handbooks, and a sales agent that picks shows for a brand and writes the deck.
HR coach →Sales agent →Research
4 AI research papers
Papers I once barely understood slowly turned into papers I wrote. Here's what each one is about, in plain words.
First author · AIC
6.1% → 71.1%TOOL CALLS
Advancing SLM Tool-Use Capability using Reinforcement Learning
- Cheap small models need exact tool-call formatting.
- GRPO training: any extra text earns zero reward.
- A 3B model reached 71.1% tool-call accuracy on one T4 GPU.
First author · RCSM
61% vs 43%SEASONAL COLOUR
Towards Actionable Fashion AI: A Holistic, End-to-End Style Recommendation Assistant
- Seasonal colours and body shape become 20-25 clothing picks.
- Fine-tuned DINOv2: 61% seasonal-colour accuracy versus Gemini 2.5 Flash at 43%.
- Designed to run on a phone.
Co-first author (equal contribution) · SSITCON
0.69 MAERECOMMENDATION ERROR
LightFusionRec: Lightweight Transformers-Based Cross-Domain Recommendation Model
- Recommend books from movies a user liked, even with little history.
- Combine DistilBERT text features with FastText genre features.
- MAE (mean absolute error): 0.69 at top 20%, beating text-only, genre-only and TF-IDF baselines.
Second author · ICOCT
83 FPSREAL-TIME TRACKING
Advanced AI-Based Detection and Tracking System (ADTS) for Crime Prevention and Identification in Real-Time Surveillance
- Detect people, recognise faces and track them across CCTV cameras.
- YOLOv8, MTCNN and FaceNet: 83 frames per second.
- IDF1 (identity-tracking score): 89.8%.
Awards & roles
Beyond the papers
College was never just about academics for me.
- Research Head, IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, NMIMS
- Student Coordinator, Student Research Group, NMIMS
- Sub-Head, Google Developer Student Clubs, NMIMS (400+ students)
Work
Things I've built
A mix of things running in production and experiments I just wanted answers to.
JioHotstar
Text-to-SQL sports chatbots
96% accurate
- Started from zero, with a lot of research before building
- 12 seasons of Pro Kabaddi in English, Hindi, Hinglish, Gujarati or Marathi, plus ball-by-ball T20
- 96% right on our 150-question Kabaddi test
JioHotstar
Cloud cost dashboard
4 days → 5 min
- ~62 projects across GCP and AWS in one view
- About 4 days of manual work down to about 5 minutes
- Senior management uses it now
JioHotstar
HR AI Coach
Hybrid RAG
- Answers questions from company handbooks
- Keeps HR record facts separate from anything the AI writes, so the two never mix
JioHotstar
Sales Agent
Top 5 shows
- Takes a brand's brief and picks the 5 best-fit shows
- Writes the pitch deck around them
- The sales team uses it now
Project
Promo effectiveness dashboard
6 sources
- Shows how a promo is actually landing
- Pulls signals from YouTube, Instagram, X, Reddit, Google Trends and Hotstar
- Reads the comments for sentiment
Project
Episode condensation
43% shorter
- Works from the dubbing script
- Trims recaps, ad-break gaps and pauses
- One episode went from 24:33 to 13:56
JioHotstar
Audio separation pipeline
6 stems
- Benchmarked SAM-Audio against HTDemucs on a real production file; BS-RoFormer won out
- Splits TV audio into 6 stems, so crowd noise, applause and camera clicks come out while the music stays
- Ran on masters from 4 channels
JioHotstar
Music catalog downloads
~10k audio files
- Crawls a music library's full genre tree and saves each track as WAV to cloud storage
- Playwright automation, with ProcessPool running workers in parallel and systemd keeping long bulk downloads going
- A download lock so workers never clash, and every file checked against its track title and catalog ID
JioHotstar
Music copyright detection
180+ songs
- Tested ACRCloud, AudioShake and Gemini against cue sheets I checked by hand
- AudioShake did best, 80.8-90.1% on music-only audio
- Moved timestamps out of the LLM and into Python, which took Gemini to 64%
JioHotstar
Cricket AI commentary
Stats-locked
- Proof of concept: AI describing a cricket match between balls
- A strict data contract: it only says what the live stats and scorebug back up
- No generic filler
JioHotstar
HR onboarding videos
5 models tested
- Tried 5 lip-sync models, picked LatentSync
- With ElevenLabs voices and n8n, makes personalized onboarding videos in batches
PshPyi Labs · internship
Personal branding agent
n8n agents
- Co-built an LLM platform on n8n that writes, schedules and publishes social posts
- I designed the agent workflow nodes that make each post personal
Project
Personalized news recommender
Java + K8s
- Java and Spring Boot microservices with service discovery and an API gateway
- Runs on Docker and Kubernetes
- Recommendations from TF-IDF and each user's preferences
Databyte · internship
Multi-camera CCTV tracking
→ research paper
- Real-time face tracking across multiple CCTV feeds
- YOLOv8, MTCNN and FaceNet
- Became the ADTS paper
Side projects
Built for fun
- Hacker News → tweets. Every day it reads the top 15 Hacker News stories, sums them up and drafts 10 tweets from them. I built it with CrewAI and Streamlit. GitHub ↗
- Salary negotiation bot. It predicts your salary with ML, and then you haggle with an LLM bot over it. After that, a second bot negotiates the same profile with a boss bot, so you can see who got the better deal. GitHub ↗
Writing
Explained simply
Paper deep dive
Never Give Up: why easy problems eat the RL budget
A deep dive into the Matthew Effect, and how adaptive sampling gives hard problems another chance.
Reinforcement Learning
Paper deep dive
A coin flip made this model better at math. Or did it?
Notes on "Spurious Rewards", a paper about what RL training really teaches a model.
Reinforcement Learning
My research
The polite sentence that broke my model
How we taught small language models to call tools with GRPO, and why the strictest rule worked best.
Reinforcement Learning
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