Jakhongir Saydaliev

EPFL | UT Austin

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I research large language models as an MSc student at EPFL. I’m fortunate to have worked at the NLP, DHLAB, LINX and ITML labs and also at SwissAI and Logitech. I have done my Bachelor’s at Politecnico di Torino.

Research Interests

I research building inclusive, multimodal reasoning AI systems that work for everyone. Below are some areas I’ve been working on:

  • Multilingual NLP: I want to bridge the gaps in multilingual NLP & ensure AI benefits linguistically diverse and underrepresented communities
    • ConLID: Contrastive language identification for low-resource languages
    • Apertus: The first large-scale language model developed in Switzerland
  • Multimodal Reasoning: Models need to reason across modalities, not just text, to handle real-world scenarios
  • Efficient Reasoning: As we scale to multimodal scenarios, we need computationally efficient reasoning to make deployment practical
    • Terminator: Efficient reasoning method to mitigate the “overthinking” phenomenon in LLMs

News

Mar 2026 I joined the ITML lab at UT Austin as a visiting research scholar
Jan 2026 Our ConLID paper got accepted to EACL
Oct 2025 Our paper got published at Computational Humanities Research
Sep 2025 Joined Logitech as an ML Research Intern to work on Computer Use Agents
Jun 2025 Joined SwissAI to work on reasoning for vision language models through reinforcement learning
May 2025 Won the 2nd place in a hackathon on efficient LLM training [code]
Feb 2025 Started a new research project on Multimodal Reasoning at the NLP lab with Prof. Antoine Bosselut
Nov 2024 Won the AXA challenge in Lauzhack 2024 Hackathon [code]
Sep 2024 Participated in DeepFake Hackaton
Jun 2024 Started Summer Research Internship in NLP Lab on Multilingual Model Training project by Swiss AI Initiative with Prof. Antoine Bosselut
Apr 2024 Participated in LLMs Hackathon
Mar 2024 Participated in AMLD 2024
Feb 2024 Started Student Research Assistantship in DHLAB on LLM QA system project by Venice Time Machine with Prof. Frédéric Kaplan

Selected Publications

  1. terminator.png
    TERMINATOR: Learning Optimal Exit Points for Early Stopping in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
    Alliot Nagle, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Dhia Garbaya, and 3 more authors
    Under review at International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
  2. conlid_figure.png
    ConLID: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Low-Resource Language Identification
    Negar Foroutan*, Jakhongir Saydaliev*, Ye Eun Kim, and 1 more author
    In European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2026
  3. venice_figure.png
    LLM Agents for Interactive Exploration of Historical Cadastre Data: Framework and Application to Venice
    Tristan Karch*, Jakhongir Saydaliev*, Isabella Di Lenardo, and 1 more author
    Computational Humanities Research (CHR), 2025