About me

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Applied Machine Learning Lab at the University of Bonn since July 2026. I earned my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 2023, where my dissertation explored practical models for sequential decision-making in NLP and RL. I am a co-author of RL4LMs, one of the first open-source training frameworks for fine-tuning large language models with reinforcement learning (paper).

After my PhD, I worked at several early-stage startups in the US and Germany, where I gained practical experience developing agentic workflows for document-heavy domains and fine-tuning small language models (SLMs).

Research Interests

My current research interests include, but are not limited to:

• Agentic Systems: Developing and benchmarking agentic systems, communication topologies, routing, and orchestration.

• Harness Optimization / Meta-Harnesses: Automatically generating harnesses for models and optimizing them continuously from a small set of input-output examples through evolutionary or hill-climbing methods.

• Model Ensembles / Merging: Combining multiple models to improve robustness, coverage, and reliability in complex language tasks.

• Continual Learning: Enabling models to self-improve from production traces, with or without human feedback.

I am also interested in post-training, benchmarking, and red-teaming.

Highlighted Publications

Google Scholar

• Is Reinforcement Learning (Not) for Natural Language Processing: Benchmarks, Baselines, and Building Blocks for Natural Language Policy Optimization
  Rajkumar Ramamurthy, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Kianté Brantley, Jack Hessel, Rafet Sifa, Christian Bauckhage, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yejin Choi
  Proc. ICLR, 2023
  [Paper] · [Code]

• Cats Confuse Reasoning LLM: Query Agnostic Adversarial Triggers for Reasoning Models
  Meghana Arakkal Rajeev, Rajkumar Ramamurthy, Prapti Trivedi, Vikas Yadav, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, James Zou, Nazneen Rajani
  Proc. COLM, 2025
  [Paper]

Contact Details

If you want to get in contact, write an Email to rajkumarramamurthy[at]uni-bonn.de or ramamurthy[at]iai.uni-bonn.de.