David Alvarez Melis

@elmelis

Asst. Prof. @hseas @KempnerInst || Researcher @MSRNE || ML + NLP || Previously: @MIT_CSAIL NYU @IBMResearch @ITAM_mx

Cambridge, MA

dmelis.github.io

Joined August 2010

2,363 Following

2,150 Followers

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David Alvarez Melis
@elmelis
Oct 22
We’re hiring Senior and Principal researchers in ML & Stats at Microsoft Research New England @MSRNE! Amazing colleagues, remarkable breadth and depth of expertise, and unbeatable views. Come join us! Questions about the roles or the group? DM me!
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David Alvarez Melis
@elmelis
Oct 15
Turns out the decision model was inside the LLM all along 😆 Our new paper: generalist LLMs are already zero-shot competitive with Jev. A little fine-tuning takes them further. Awesome (and incredibly swift) work by Jonathan and Andrew. arxiv.org/abs/2610.17205
Jonathan Geuter
@JonathanGeuter
Oct 15
Everyone is talking about 'System One models' like Jev: given a state, question, and set of options, they return a calibrated decision at a fraction of the cost of an LLM call. But do we need specialized architectures and recipes to train them? We show you don’t: 🧵👇
Made with AI
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David Alvarez Melis
@elmelis
Oct 9
Long overdue announcement: thrilled to see Sunny Qin @sunnytqin and Paula Rodriguez-Diaz @paularodrid named 2027 Siebel Scholars! 🎉 So proud of these two rising stars.
Five Ph.D. students named Siebel Scholars
From seas.harvard.edu
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David Alvarez Melis
@elmelis
Oct 8
Not at #COLM2026 this year (and having intense FOMO about it). But two former MSR interns are there presenting our work there, both are in poster sessions today:
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David Alvarez Melis
@elmelis
Oct 6
My flight last night was delayed (thanks @Delta!) so I used the 'bonus' time to (finally, after lots of procrastination) put together (i.e. vibe-code) a website for my OT course at @Harvard (CS 2840, Fall '25) dmelis.github.io/otml-course/.
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David Alvarez Melis

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