Manish Dhakal

Efficient ML | CV | NLP

Manish Dhakal is a Ph.D. student in Industrial Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, supervised by Dr. Yi Ding. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia State University. His research focuses on efficient adaptation and knowledge compression of foundation models, from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models to vision-language-action (VLA) models, making them cheaper to specialize and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. His publications have been presented at premier venues, such as EMNLP, WACV, MICCAI, ACCV, IJCNLP-AACL, CVPR-W, etc.