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.
- 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 and embassy members. These can be formal or informal; if interested, please message me via email or LinkedIn, with the word "Advising" in the title. Thanks!