Biography

I lead pre-training at poolside inside the Applied Research organisation, where most recently I was responsible for the pre-training of Laguna M.1 and XS.2 on thousands of GPUs.

Before that, as a Senior Researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) at AssemblyAI, I was responsible for the pre-training of Universal-1 and contributed to multimodal LLMs. Earlier, as an AI Research Engineer at InstaDeep's and BioNTech's joint AI innovation lab, I led a team of four engineers developing AI models for the treatment of cancer and the prevention and therapy of infectious diseases, including SARS-CoV-2.

I have a Master of Science in Machine Learning from University College London, where I was part of the Deciding, Acting, and Reasoning with Knowledge (DARK) lab, being supervised by Mikayel Samvelyan, Patrick Lewis, and Tim Rocktäschel. Before joining UCL, I completed my Bachelor of Science in Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart under the supervision of Roman Klinger.

Interests

  • Large Language Models
  • Pre-training at Scale
  • Distributed Training
  • Architecture Research

Education

  • MSc in Machine Learning University College London, 2021
  • BSc in Natural Language Processing University of Stuttgart, 2019

Experience

  1. Team & Tech Lead (Applied Research/Pre-training)

    poolside

    Oct 2024 – Present · London, United Kingdom

    Pre-training large language models for code generation. Joined as a Member of Engineering, promoted to Tech Lead (Apr 2025) and then Team & Tech Lead (Dec 2025).

    Set the technical direction for architecture research and distributed training behind the Laguna models, scaling Mixture-of-Experts training runs to 8,192 H200 GPUs and hundreds of billions of parameters. Leading a team of 9 researchers and engineers.

  2. Senior Researcher

    AssemblyAI

    Sep 2023 – Oct 2024 · London, United Kingdom

    Training multimodal (text and speech) large language models in JAX. Joined as Researcher II, promoted to Senior Researcher (Feb 2024).

    Led self-supervised pre-training research for Universal-1, a SOTA multilingual speech-to-text model, on 12.5M hours of audio (~4.5T tokens) for models ranging from 660M to 2B parameters, trained on 512 TPU v5e. Implemented and optimised paired JAX and PyTorch codebases for model training and deployment.

  3. Research Engineer II

    InstaDeep

    Oct 2021 – Aug 2023 · London, United Kingdom

    Led a team of four research engineers, developing, evaluating and deploying state-of-the-art AI models (Transformers and Graph Neural Networks) based on the latest AI research applied to biology.

  4. Machine Learning Research Intern

    Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence

    May 2020 – Aug 2020 · Renningen, Germany

    Developed a state-of-the-art relation extraction model based on distributional similarity with TensorFlow and transformers. Generated an automatically annotated text corpus with unique named entity identifiers based on the English Wikipedia encyclopedia.

  5. Freelance Editor

    ComputerBase GmbH

    Sep 2014 – Present · Berlin, Germany

    Researching and reporting about current IT topics including artificial intelligence for one of the largest online computer magazines in Germany (>30 million PIs per month).

Publications

  • Laguna M.1/XS.2 Technical Report

    Julien Abadji, Marah Abdin, Connor Adams, and 43 others, Robert McHardy, and 48 others, Jason Warner

    In arXiv preprint · 2026

    BibTeX
    @misc{abadji2026lagunam1xs2technicalreport,
          title={Laguna M.1/XS.2 Technical Report}, 
          author={Julien Abadji and Marah Abdin and Connor Adams and Eric Alcaide and Mustafa Altun and Michele Artoni and Junze Bao and Uday Barar and Vassilis Bekiaris and Arkadii Bessonov and Benjamin Bütikofer and Jonathan Chang and Yen-Chun Chen and Dmitry Chernenkov and Yang Chi and Filippos Christianos and Fenia Christopoulou and Razvan-Andrei Ciocoiu and Tzachi Cohen and Yohann Coppel and Dmitrii Emelianenko and Brandon Fergerson and Brian Fitzgerald and Matthias Gallé and Alex Golonzovskyi and George Grigorev and Yiyang Hao and Christian Hensel and Jan Huenermann and Ye Ji and Sarthak Joshi and Eiso Kant and Kabir Khandpur and Seonghyeon Kim and Vladimir Kirichenko and Umut Kocasarac and Ilya Kochik and Ivan Komarov and Chaerin Kong and Anurag Koul and François-Joseph Lacroix and Sergei Laktionov and Waren Long and Quentin Malartic and Vadim Markovtsev and Afonso Marques and Robert McHardy and Carlos Mocholí and Dmitry Monakhov and Adam Morris and Martin Muller and Christian Mürtz and Robin Nabel and Thien Nguyen and Rok Novosel and Szymon Ozog and Aalhad Patankar and Aleksei Petrov and Alexandre Piché and Arthur Pignet and Teodor Poncu and Phil Potter and Alexander Rakowski and Pierre-Yves Ritschard and Jay Roberts and Joe Rowell and Piotr Sarna and Pierre-André Savalle and Uladzislau Sazanovich and Nikita Shapovalov and Arsenii Shevchenko and Mikhail Shilkov and Andrei Sokol and Mohamed Soliman and Jack Stephenson and Victor Storchan and Dragos-Constantin Tantaru and Artem Tyurin and Adrian Wälchli and Pengming Wang and Jianxiao Yang and Renat Zayashnikov and Alexander Zelenka Martin and Nikolay Zinov and Caroline Bercier and José Caldeira and Margarida Garcia and Tom George and Kabeer Gharzai and Glenn Hitchcock and Carson Klingenberg and Ivo Pinto and Varun Randery and Noah Smith and Arina Sugako and Jason Warner},
          year={2026},
          eprint={2605.27605},
          archivePrefix={arXiv},
          primaryClass={cs.AI},
          url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27605}, 
    }
  • Are We Done with MMLU?

    Aryo Pradipta Gema, Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Giwon Hong, Alessio Devoto, Alberto Carlo Maria Mancino, Rohit Saxena, Xuanli He, Yu Zhao, Xiaotang Du, Mohammad Reza Ghasemi Madani, Claire Barale, Robert McHardy, Joshua Harris, Jean Kaddour, Emile van Krieken, Pasquale Minervini

    In NAACL 2025 · 2025

    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{gema-etal-2025-done,
        title = "Are We Done with {MMLU}?",
        author = "Gema, Aryo Pradipta  and
          Leang, Joshua Ong Jun  and
          Hong, Giwon  and
          Devoto, Alessio  and
          Mancino, Alberto Carlo Maria  and
          Saxena, Rohit  and
          He, Xuanli  and
          Zhao, Yu  and
          Du, Xiaotang  and
          Ghasemi Madani, Mohammad Reza  and
          Barale, Claire  and
          McHardy, Robert  and
          Harris, Joshua  and
          Kaddour, Jean  and
          Van Krieken, Emile  and
          Minervini, Pasquale",
        editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
          Ritter, Alan  and
          Wang, Lu",
        booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
        month = apr,
        year = "2025",
        address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
        publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
        url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.262/",
        pages = "5069--5096",
        ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
        abstract = "Maybe not. We identify and analyse errors in the popular Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Even though MMLU is widely adopted, our analysis demonstrates numerous ground truth errors that obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. For example, we find that 57{\%} of the analysed questions in the Virology subset contain errors. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive framework for identifying dataset errors using a novel error annotation protocol. Then, we create MMLU-Redux, which is a subset of 5,700 manually re-annotated questions across all 57 MMLU subjects. Using MMLU-Redux, we demonstrate significant discrepancies with the model performance metrics that were originally reported. Our results strongly advocate for revising MMLU`s error-ridden questions to enhance its future utility and reliability as a benchmark. Therefore, we open up MMLU-Redux for additional annotation."
    }
  • Anatomy of Industrial Scale Multilingual ASR

    Francis McCann Ramirez, Luka Chkhetiani, Andrew Ehrenberg, Robert McHardy, Rami Botros, Yash Khare, Andrea Vanzo, Taufiquzzaman Peyash, Gabriel Oexle, Michael Liang, Ilya Sklyar, Enver Fakhan, Ahmed Etefy, Daniel McCrystal, Sam Flamini, Domenic Donato, Takuya Yoshioka

    In arXiv preprint · 2024

    BibTeX
    @article{ramirez2024anatomy,
          title={Anatomy of Industrial Scale Multilingual ASR},
          author={McCann Ramirez, Francis and Chkhetiani, Luka and Ehrenberg, Andrew and McHardy, Robert and Botros, Rami and Khare, Yash and Vanzo, Andrea and Peyash, Taufiquzzaman and Oexle, Gabriel and Liang, Michael and Sklyar, Ilya and Fakhan, Enver and Etefy, Ahmed and McCrystal, Daniel and Flamini, Sam and Donato, Domenic and Yoshioka, Takuya},
          year={2024},
          journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.09841},
    }
  • LightMHC: A Light Model for pMHC Structure Prediction with Graph Neural Networks

    Antoine P. Delaunay, Yunguan Fu, Nikolai Gorbushin, Robert McHardy, Bachir A. Djermani, Liviu Copoiu, Michael Rooney, Maren Lang, Andrey Tovchigrechko, Uğur Şahin, Karim Beguir, Nicolas Lopez Carranza

    In NeurIPS MLSB 2023 · 2023

    DOI
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{delaunay-etal-2023-lightmhc,
        title = "LightMHC: A Light Model for pMHC Structure Prediction with Graph Neural Networks",
        author = "Delaunay, Antoine P.  and
          Fu, Yunguan  and
          Gorbushin, Nikolai and
          McHardy, Robert and
          Djermani, Bachir A. and
          Copoiu, Liviu and
          Rooney, Michael and
          Lang, Maren and
          Tovchigrechko, Andrey and
          Şahin, Uğur and
          Beguir, Karim and
          Lopez Carranza, Nicolas
          ",
        booktitle = "Machine Learning in Structural Biology Workshop at the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)",
        month = dec,
        year = "2023",
        address = "New Orleans, Louisiana",
        publisher = "",
        url = "https://www.mlsb.io/",
        doi = "10.1101/2023.11.21.568015",
        pages = "",
    }
  • Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models

    Jean Kaddour, Joshua Harris, Maximilian Mozes, Herbie Bradley, Roberta Raileanu, Robert McHardy

    In arXiv preprint · 2023

    BibTeX
    @article{kaddour2023challenges,
      title={Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models},
      author={Kaddour, Jean and Harris, Joshua and Mozes, Maximilian and Bradley, Herbie and Raileanu, Roberta and McHardy, Robert},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.10169},
      year={2023}
    }
  • Peptide-MHC Structure Prediction With Mixed Residue and Atom Graph Neural Network

    Antoine P Delaunay, Yunguan Fu, Alberto Begue, Robert McHardy, Bachir A Djermani, Michael Rooney, Andrey Tovchigrechko, Liviu Copoiu, Marcin J Skwark, Nicolas Lopez Carranza, Maren Lang, Karim Beguir, Ugur Sahin

    In NeurIPS MLSB 2022 · 2022

    DOI
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{delaunay-etal-2022-gnn,
        title = "Peptide-MHC Structure Prediction With Mixed Residue and Atom Graph Neural Network",
        author = "Delaunay, Antoine P.  and
          Fu, Yunguan  and
          Bégué, Alberto and
          McHardy, Robert and
          Djermani, Bachir A. and
          Rooney, Michael and
          Tovchigrechko, Andrey and
          Copoiu, Liviu and
          Skwark, Marcin J. and
          Lopez Carranza, Nicolas and
          Lang, Maren and
          Beguir, Karim and
          Şahin, Uğur
          ",
        booktitle = "Machine Learning in Structural Biology Workshop at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)",
        month = dec,
        year = "2022",
        address = "New Orleans, Louisiana",
        publisher = "",
        url = "https://www.mlsb.io/",
        doi = "10.1101/2022.11.23.517618",
        pages = "",
    }
  • Adversarial Training for Satire Detection: Controlling for Confounding Variables

    Robert McHardy, Heike Adel, Roman Klinger

    In NAACL 2019 · 2019

    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{mchardy-etal-2019-adversarial,
        title = "Adversarial Training for Satire Detection: Controlling for Confounding Variables",
        author = "McHardy, Robert  and
          Adel, Heike  and
          Klinger, Roman",
        booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North {A}merican Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)",
        month = jun,
        year = "2019",
        address = "Minneapolis, Minnesota",
        publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
        url = "https://aclanthology.org/N19-1069",
        doi = "10.18653/v1/N19-1069",
        pages = "660--665",
        abstract = "The automatic detection of satire vs. regular news is relevant for downstream applications (for instance, knowledge base population) and to improve the understanding of linguistic characteristics of satire. Recent approaches build upon corpora which have been labeled automatically based on article sources. We hypothesize that this encourages the models to learn characteristics for different publication sources (e.g., {``}The Onion{''} vs. {``}The Guardian{''}) rather than characteristics of satire, leading to poor generalization performance to unseen publication sources. We therefore propose a novel model for satire detection with an adversarial component to control for the confounding variable of publication source. On a large novel data set collected from German news (which we make available to the research community), we observe comparable satire classification performance and, as desired, a considerable drop in publication classification performance with adversarial training. Our analysis shows that the adversarial component is crucial for the model to learn to pay attention to linguistic properties of satire.",
    }

Contact

Feel free to reach out about pre-training, distributed training, or research collaborations.