About Me

I am Jean de Dieu Nyandwi. I work on machine learning and multimodal AI and am currently a visiting researcher at CMU’s Language Technologies Institute (NeuLab), where I am fortunate to work with Prof. Graham Neubig and other amazing colleagues at Neulab and across CMU. I have also had the privilege of collaborating with Prof. Deva Ramanan.

I am broadly interested in machine learning, natural language processing, multimodal recognition, and data-centric approaches. I am currently interested in multimodal post-training, multimodal reasoning, and data-efficient learning.

I have previously worked on natural adversarial evaluation in VLMs(NaturalBench - NeurIPS 2024), grounding multimodal LLMs with world knowledge(EMNLP 2025), and open-source multilingual/cultural multimodal LLMs/datasets (CulturalGround - EMNLP 2025, Pangea - ICLR 2024).

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I completed MS Engineering AI at Carnegie Mellon University. I did undergrad in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at University of Rwanda, learning machine learning on the side. Prior to that, I achieved the top score, country wide, in Advanced Level National Examinations in Electronics and Telecommunication in senior highschool.

Beside research, I also have interests in AI education and accessibility, and I spend a fair amount of time designing, writing deep dives, exploring, and sharing learning resources.

Outside technical works, I regularly workout, mostly resilience training, crossfit, calisthenics, basketball, and running.

Publications

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Research Articles

The Transformer Blueprint: A Holistic Guide to the Transformer Neural Network Architecture | Blog | Views: 31K | July 2023

Latest News

Aug 2025 - CulturalGround is accepted in EMNLP(Main Conference) 2025!!
Aug 2025 - We are releasing CulturalGround, the largest multilingual/cultural VQA dataset! ArXiv preprint also available now.
July 2025: Gave a smoll guest lecture on ML Lifecycle at ALU. Slides here.
Jan 2025 - Pangea is accepted to ICLR 2025!!
Dec 2024 - Joining Neulab at LTI CMU as a visiting researcher, working with and learning a lot from Graham Neubig and the team 🤍🥳!!
Oct 2024 - We are releasing Pangea-7B, a fully open multilingual multimodal LLM that outperform existing open models in multilingual & culturally diverse contexts 🔥🔥. Release include models, code, training data, benchmark!!
Oct 2024 - NaturalBench paper is now publicly available on ArXiv!!
Sep 2024 - NaturalBench was accepted to NeurIPS 2024 - Datasets and Benchmarks Track 🥳🔥
May 2024 - Graduated from CMU MS Engineering AI!!
Jul 2023 - Published Transformer Blueprint article!
Oct 2022 - Listed in top 50 AI influencers by Onalytica
Sep 2022 - Nominated in DeepLearning.AI Event Ambassadors Spotlight 2022
Aug 2022 - Started MS AI at Carnegie Mellon University Africa
May 2022 - Complete Machine Learning Package is now available on web

Talks

June 2024 - Presented Multimodal LLMs at IndabaX Rwanda. Find slides here.
May 2024 - Talked about Vision Language Models/Multimodal LLMs in CMU 18661 Introduction to Machine Learning in Student Research Lecture.