Lexington Whalen
Research Scientist, NVIDIA Research (DLER) · NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Georgia Tech
I am a Research Scientist on the DLER team at NVIDIA Research in Santa Clara, CA. Previously, at SoftBank's SB Intuitions, I co-led pretraining and inference optimization for the Sarashina LLM family — Japan's largest language models. Before that, during my first stint at NVIDIA Research, I co-developed Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion (EMNLP 2026) and co-led Efficient-DLM (ICML 2026). I was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and pursued an M.S. in CS at Georgia Tech. I also serve as an informal advisor on U.S.–Japan AI policy, joining periodic roundtables with U.S. Embassy Tokyo.
I am a history enthusiast and enjoy discussing history, meaning, and geopolitics. I also enjoy climbing and bouldering, and am trying to get better at it. There's other stuff too probably.
I am committed to mentoring students, and make time for this every week. Please feel free to message me on LinkedIn and I will try to respond. Any background is welcome, and the request can be anything from resume reviews to just general advice. Please note that I cannot help with internship / university / job applications unless I directly was involved in your project.
- Nov 2026Looking for a nice bouldering club in Santa Clara or SF! Please feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions!
- Oct 2026Rejoining NVIDIA Research as a Research Scientist on the DLER team in Santa Clara, CA! Starting November 16.
- Oct 2026Talk at SB Intuitions: Faster, Smaller, Lighter: Best Practices for LLM Efficiency!
- Sep 2026New tech report: KBBQ: A Predictive Noise Law and the Limits of Spectrum Flattening in FP4 Quantization!
- Aug 2026Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion accepted at EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference)!
- Jul 2026Talk at SB Intuitions: Diffusion Language Models: From Fundamentals to Applications!
- Jun 2026SB Intuitions releases Sarashina2.2-TTS, a SoTA Japanese TTS model, and the Sarashina3 mini/nano tech report. For the bigger models, we'll be using our in-house spec decoding recipe!
- Jun 2026New preprint: Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right — optimizations to raise accepted draft length by up to 76%!
- Jun 2026Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion released on Hugging Face — ~1M total downloads, 6× tokens-per-pass over Qwen3-8B!
- Jun 2026Efficient-DLM accepted at ICML 2026!
- Jun 2026NeRArch-Sim accepted at ISCA 2026!
- Apr 2026Joined SoftBank SB Intuitions as Pretraining & Inference Optimization Research Lead. Gave the SoftBank Group entrance ceremony speech!
- Apr 2025LAMB accepted at ACL 2025!
- Apr 2025Early-Bird Diffusion accepted at CVPR 2025!
I am open to calls about ML/AI advising, for companies or governments, and have in the past done chats with journalists, embassy members, congressional staffers, policy makers, etc, for both the United States of America and Japan. These can be formal or informal; if interested, please message me via email or LinkedIn, with the word "Advising" in the title. Thanks!