Samsung R&d

# Samsung R&D Research Intern – IIT Patna (On-Campus) CSE student. Two rounds: Technical, then HR. ## Round 1 – Technical The interviewer worked in AI/ML and expected the intro to focus on AI. He cut the candidate off when they started talking about dev skills and experience. **Introduce yourself.** **How would you fix overfitting?** The candidate said to reduce model complexity and listed a few ways. Follow-up: what if you can't change the architecture? After a hint pointing at the dataset, the answer was to augment the data with samples derived from the existing ones. **What is early stopping?** The candidate explained the epoch-vs-loss idea, then was handed a rough sheet and asked to draw the learning curves. **How do you split a dataset before training, and why?** Train / validation / test. Follow-up 1: what happens if the validation set includes training data? The validation score becomes over-optimistic, so any decisions based on it (hyperparameters, when to stop training) can't be trusted. Follow-up 2: why do you need a validation set at all? For hyperparameter tuning. He then asked for examples: learning rate, the regularisation parameter λ, etc. **Have you studied OS?** OS was being taught in the current semester, so the candidate had only partial knowledge. He asked about context switching; the answer was wrong, but the interviewer didn't seem to weigh it much. **Grid meeting point.** Given an R×C binary grid where 1 = city and 0 = empty, find the empty cell that minimises the sum of distances to all cities. The candidate proposed a multi-source BFS with a grid of sets tracking which cities had reached each cell, stopping once a cell had been reached by every city. The interviewer ruled out that extra space. The candidate couldn't meet the space requirement, but the interviewer said they were close to the optimal solution. **Word transformation.** You're given a source string, a destination string and a list of strings. In one operation you change exactly one character, and the resulting string must be in the list. Return the minimum number of operations to reach the destination. Treat strings as nodes, connect strings that differ by one character, and run BFS from the source. **Anything else you want to tell me?** The candidate asked him to open a project that's deployed live. He opened it on his phone but said he couldn't really judge it since he isn't a dev person. ## Round 2 – HR Introduce yourself Why only technical skills in your intro? No hobbies or family to talk about? Category Why Samsung? Which other companies' OAs have you taken, and how did they go? Would you still join if I told you there's no PPO? Puzzle: cut a cake into 8 symmetric pieces using the knife only three times. The cake has cream on top. Any questions? (The candidate asked whether interns get taken on trips.) Are you sure you want to accept the offer?