Portrait of Amit Namburi

Amit Namburi

✓ B.S.Computer Science @ UC San Diego M.S. Computer Science @ UC San Diego

About

I'm Amit Namburi, a BS/MS Computer Science student at UC San Diego passionate about research in Multimodal LLMs and Recommender Systems. My work spans fine-tuning LLMs, audio-based ML, and multimodal AI, and I'm pursuing my MS to further deepen my expertise in these cutting edge areas. I'm really diving deep into Multimodal AI and Recommender Systems research, exploring how we can build more intelligent systems that understand and process multiple types of data.

Large Language Models Recommender Systems Audio x ML Deep Learning Retrieval & Evaluation
  • Advisor: Prof. Julian McAuley
  • Interests: Multimodal AI, Recommender Systems, ML Systems

Experience

Software Engineer Intern

Apple Jun 2025 – Sep 2025

CoreOS • San Diego, CA

Graduate Student Researcher

McAuley Lab Jan 2024 – Present

UC San Diego • San Diego, CA

  • Research on Multimodal AI and LLMs for Audio Processing and Visual Understanding
  • Developing novel approaches to fine-tune LLMs for multimodal tasks and recommender systems

Teaching Assistant | TA

UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) Mar 2025 – Present · 7 mos

Hybrid • San Diego, California, United States

  • TA for:
    • CSE 158/258: Recommender Systems and Web Mining (Fall 2025)
    • CSE 153/253: Machine Learning for Music (Spring 2025)
  • Professor: Julian McAuley

Instructional Assistant | Tutor

UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) Apr 2023 – Mar 2025 · 2 yrs

On-site • San Diego, California, United States

  • Tutor for:
    • CSE 100: Advanced Data Structures
    • CSE 12: Basic Data Structures and Object-Oriented Design
  • Mentored 1000+ students in fundamental computer science concepts
  • Conducted office hours and review sessions

Computational Researcher

FAIR Data Informatics Lab Mar 2023 – Mar 2025 · 2 yrs 1 mo

Part-time • San Diego, California, United States • On-site

  • Redesigned Foundry Dashboard, a scalable ETL system for biomedical curators with Angular.js
  • Developed automated Resource Ingestion Protocol for EC2-hosted clients
  • Built RAG system using LlamaParse, LlamaIndex, and NVIDIA NIM microservices
  • Mentored by Dr. Anita Bandrowski

Vice President

UCSD Computer Science & Engineering Society Apr 2022 – Jun 2023 · 1 yr 3 mos

San Diego, California, United States

  • Led student programs and built community initiatives
  • Hosted events with CSE professors and fostered community growth
  • Created a great environment for students to grow in Computer Science
  • Organized technical workshops and networking events

Front-End Developer Intern

IPMD, Inc. Jun 2022 – Sep 2022 · 4 mos

Part-time • Berkeley, California, United States • Remote

  • Built web features using React.js and Node.js
  • Designed and implemented scalable APIs
  • Collaborated with development team on front-end architecture
  • Contributed to user interface design and user experience improvements

Publications

2025
Pending

MusiCRS: Benchmarking Audio-Centric Conversational Recommendation

*Rohan Surana, Amit Namburi, *Gagan Mundada, *Abhay Lal, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
arXiv preprint - Submitted September 2025
Conversational Recommendation Audio-Centric Benchmarking
arXiv Scholar
2026
EMNLP

WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning

Gagan Mundada, Yash Vishe, Amit Namburi, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
EMNLP 2026 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multimodal LLMs Music Reasoning Benchmarking
arXiv Scholar
2025
ICASSP

FUTGA-MIR: Enhancing Fine-grained and Temporally-aware Music Understanding with Music Information Retrieval

Junda Wu, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Hao-Wen Dong, Carol Chen, Jiaheng Dai
ICASSP 2025 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Music Information Retrieval Temporal Modeling Fine-grained Understanding
IEEE Xplore Scholar
2025
ICASSP

CoLLAP: Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining with Musical Temporal Structure Augmentation

Junda Wu, Warren Li, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Carol Chen, Julian McAuley
ICASSP 2025 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Contrastive Learning Language-Audio Pretraining
IEEE Xplore Scholar
Resume

Contact

Let's Connect

I'm always interested in discussing research, collaborations, and new opportunities.

LinkedIn /in/amit-namburi
GitHub @namburiamit
Google Scholar View Publications