Vatsal Raina

Vatsal Raina

CTO & Co-founder at Apta

About Me


I am currently the CTO and co-founder of Apta, building domain-specific co-pilots leveraging pre-emptive agentic flow architectures. I completed my PhD in NLP at the University of Cambridge, and have experience as an AI Research Scientist at Meta. Prior to my PhD, I graduated within the top 1% of engineering students at Cambridge.

Experience


CTO & Co-Founder, Apta AI
Dec 2023 – Present, Cambridge, UK
Apta excels at delivering next-gen search and analytics solutions for targeted verticals with bespoke AI systems.
CTO & Co-Founder, Cambridge AI Studios
Jan 2023 – Jun 2024
Led a dynamic team delivering cutting-edge AI solutions in collaboration with top academic and industry partners.
Co-Founder, MedPredict
Feb 2021 – Apr 2023, Cambridge, UK
Developed AI solutions for NHS theatre space optimization, reducing cancellations and improving outcomes.
AI Research Scientist, Meta
Aug 2022 – Nov 2022, London, UK
Worked on retrieval-based embedding representations for text documents as part of the AI Applied Research Relevance team.
Other Roles:
Deep Learning Intern at HES-SO Valais-Wallis (2022), VP of ML at Mitara (2021), Internships at University of Cambridge, Emotech LTD, and Rolls-Royce (2017-2019).

Education


PhD, Computer Engineering, University of Cambridge
2020 – 2024
Research in deep learning for speech and natural language processing including question answering and generation.
MEng, Information Engineering, University of Cambridge
2016 – 2020
Graduated with First Class Honours with Distinction. Top 1% of engineering students. Key modules: Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Probabilistic Machine Learning.
Wilson's School, Wallington, London
2009 – 2016
A Levels: Further Mathematics, Mathematics, Physics, Computing (all A*). 12 A* GCSEs.

Publications


Raina, V., Liusie, A., & Gales, M. (2025). Finetuning LLMs for Comparative Assessment Tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.15979. (accepted at COLING 2025)

Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2024). Question-Based Retrieval using Atomic Units for Enterprise RAG. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12363. (accepted at FEVER@EMNLP 2024)

Liusie, A., Raina, V., Fathullah, Y., & Gales, M. (2024). Efficient LLM Comparative Assessment: a Product of Experts Framework for Pairwise Comparisons. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.05894. (accepted at EMNLP 2024)

Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2024). Question Difficulty Ranking for Multiple-Choice Reading Comprehension. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.10704.

Wang, L., Gales, M., & Raina, V. (2024). An Information-Theoretic Approach to Analyze NLP Classification Tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.00978. (accepted at ACL 2024)

Raina, V., Liusie, A., & Gales, M. (2023, November). Assessing Distractors in Multiple-Choice Tests. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems (pp. 12-22) (accepted at Eval4NLP@AACL).

Farajidizaji, A., Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2024, May). Is It Possible to Modify Text to a Target Readability Level? In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 9325-9339) (accepted at LREC-COLING 2024).

Raina, V., Liusie, A., & Gales, M. (2023). Analyzing Multiple-Choice Reading and Listening Comprehension Tests. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.01076 (accepted at SLaTE@Interspeech 2023).

Liusie, A., Raina, V., Mullooly, A., Knill, K., & Gales, M. J. (2023). CamChoice: A Corpus of Multiple Choice Questions and Candidate Response Distributions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.13047.

Manakul, P., Fathullah, Y., Liusie, A., Raina, V., et al. (2023). CUED at ProbSum 2023: Hierarchical Ensemble of Summarization Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05317 (accepted at BioNLP@ACL 2023).

Raina, V., Kassner, N., Popat, K., Lewis, P., Cancedda, N., & Martin, L. (2023, May). ERATE: Efficient Retrieval Augmented Text Embeddings. In The Fourth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP (pp. 11-18) (accepted at Insights@EACL 2023).

Raina, V., Molchanova, N., Graziani, M., et al. (2023). Tackling Bias in the Dice Similarity Coefficient: Introducing nDSC for White Matter Lesion Segmentation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.05432 (accepted at ISBI 2023).

Molchanova, N., Raina, V., Malinin, A., et al. (2022). Novel structural-scale uncertainty measures and error retention curves: application to multiple sclerosis. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.04825 (accepted at ISBI 2023).

Liusie, A., Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2023, May). "World Knowledge" in Multiple Choice Reading Comprehension. In The Sixth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (p. 49) (accepted at FEVER@EACL 2023).

Liusie, A., Raina, V., Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2022, November). Analyzing biases to spurious correlations in text classification tasks. In Proceedings of AACL-IJCNLP 2022 (pp. 78-84) (accepted at AACL 2022).

Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2022). Multiple-choice question generation: Towards an automated assessment framework. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.11830.

Malinin, A., Athanasopoulos, A., Barakovic, M., et al. (2022). Shifts 2.0: Extending the dataset of real distributional shifts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.15407.

Raina, V., & Gales, M. (2022, May). Answer uncertainty and unanswerability in multiple-choice machine reading comprehension. In Findings of the ACL 2022 (pp. 1020-1034) (accepted at ACL Findings 2022).

Malinin, A., Band, N., Gal, Y., et al. (2021, August). Shifts: A Dataset of Real Distributional Shift Across Multiple Large-Scale Tasks. In NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track (Round 2) (accepted at NeurIPS 2021).

Raina, V., & Gales, M. J. (2021). An initial investigation of non-native spoken question-answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.04691.

Raina, V., Gales, M., & Knill, K. (2020, July). Complementary Systems for Off-Topic Spoken Response Detection. In BEA@ACL 2020 (pp. 41-51) (accepted at BEA@ACL 2020).

Media