Arka Pal

Arka Pal

AI Researcher

I run the AI research team at Ritual.

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About Me

Hello! I am currently the lead of the AI research group at Ritual. Before that, I was a researcher at Abacus.AI. Prior to a diversion into high-frequency trading, I began my AI career at DeepMind.

I have broad interests in AI and ML; my past work includes vision models, reinforcement learning, LLMs, open-source models, inference optimisation, and privacy. I have worked in both large labs and smaller startups, and with both academic and highly applied focuses. My work has been cited over 10,000 times (as of February 2026).

Current/Past Mentees

I have been fortunate to work with some amazing interns, students, and reports over the past few years.


Selected Recent Publications

Global Resolution: Optimal Multi-Draft Speculative Sampling via Convex Optimization
Rahul Krishna Thomas, Arka Pal
Oral, ICLR 2026 (top 1% of papers).
Hidden No More: Attacking and Defending Private Third-Party LLM Inference
Rahul Krishna Thomas, Louai Zahran, Erica Choi, Akilesh Potti, Micah Goldblum, Arka Pal
ICML 2025.
LiveBench: A Challenging, Contamination-Limited LLM Benchmark
*Colin White, *Samuel Dooley, *Manley Roberts, *Arka Pal, Benjamin Feuer, Siddhartha Jain, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Neel Jain, Khalid Saifullah, Sreemanti Dey, Shubh Agrawal, Sandeep Singh Sandha, Siddartha Venkat Naidu, Chinmay Hegde, Yann LeCun, Tom Goldstein, Willie Neiswanger, Micah Goldblum
* equal contribution
Spotlight, ICLR 2025 (top 3% of papers).
Fixing Failure Modes of Preference Optimisation with DPO-Positive
Arka Pal, Deep Karkhanis, Samuel Dooley, Manley Roberts, Siddartha Naidu, Colin White
Open Science for Foundation Models Workshop, ICLR 2025.
The work in this paper forms the core of the Smaug LLM model, which was the top open-source model on the HF LLM Leaderboards at launch, and remained so for over 2 months.

More publications →