Akshara Prabhakar

<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">  <script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-VRT8MLQ1QG"></script> <script> window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag() { dataLayer.push(arguments); } gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-VRT8MLQ1QG'); </script> <title>Akshara Prabhakar</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet.css"> <link href="css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.4.1/css/bootstrap.min.css"> <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.4.1/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script> <meta name="author" content="Akshara Prabhakar"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="images/dalle-ap.png"> </head> <body class="bg_colour"> <table border=0 class="bg_colour" style="width:100%;max-width:900px;border:0px;border-spacing:0px;border-collapse:separate;margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;"> <tbody> <tr style="padding:0px"> <td style="padding:0px">  <table border=0 class="bg_colour" style="width:100%;border:0px;border-spacing:0px;border-collapse:separate;margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;"> <tbody> <tr style="padding:0px"> <td style="padding:2.5%;width:25%;max-width:25%"> <a href="images/self.jpg"><img style="width:100%;max-width:100%" alt="profile photo" src="images/self.jpg" class="img-circle"></a> <p style="text-align:center"> <br> <a href="mailto:akshblr555@gmail.com" target="_blank">Email</a> &nbsp|&nbsp  <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=vvUmC_EAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate" target="_blank">Google Scholar</a> &nbsp|&nbsp <a href="https://github.com/aksh555" target="_blank">Github</a> <br> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/p-akshara/" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a> &nbsp|&nbsp <a href="https://twitter.com/aksh_555" target="_blank">Twitter</a> </p> </td> <td style="padding:2.5%;width:60%;vertical-align:top"> <p style="text-align:center"> <h1 style="text-align:center"> <name><b>Akshara </b>Prabhakar</name> </h1> </p>  <br> <div align="justify"> <p>Hi! I am an Applied Scientist at <a href="https://www.salesforceairesearch.com/">Salesforce AI Research</a>. I received my MS in <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/"> Computer Science</a> from Princeton University, advised by <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~karthikn/">Dr. Karthik Narasimhan</a>. I was part of the <a href="https://princeton-nlp.github.io/">Princeton NLP group</a> and have collaborated with the <a href="https://pli.princeton.edu/">PLI</a> and <a href="https://cocosci.princeton.edu/index.php">CoCoSci</a> labs.      Prior to grad school, I graduated as a Gold Medalist from <a href="https://www.nitk.ac.in/"> National Institute of Technology Karnataka</a>, Surathkal, advised by <a href="https://infotech.nitk.ac.in/faculty/sowmya-kamath-s" target="_blank">Dr. Sowmya Kamath</a>.    <br><br> I enjoy applied/product research to solve real-world tasks. My current works revolve around benchmarking large language models, language agents and understanding their cognitive aspects.  <br>  </p> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table>  <button style="border:0px transparent; background-color: transparent;outline:none;" type="button" class="collapsible" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#content-exp" id="exp"> <heading>Experience</heading> </button> <div id="content-exp"> <br>     I am fortunate to have studied and worked at some wonderful places! <br> <br> <div class="row"> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.salesforceairesearch.com' target='_blank'><figure> <img src="images/sfr.png" height="90" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">jun 2024 - now</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/' target='_blank'><figure> <img src="images/microsoft.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">summer 2023</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://cs.princeton.edu/' target='_blank'><img src="images/princeton.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">2022 - 2024<br>MS</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.amazon.science/' target='_blank'><img src="images/amazon.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">summer 2022</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.marcus.com/us/en' target='_blank' style="width: 55px"><img src="images/gs.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">summer 2021</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/' target='_blank'><img src="images/ai-nlp-ml.jpg" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">2021</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.iitg.ac.in/anand.ashish/amal_lab.html' target='_blank'><img src="images/iitg.png" height="90" style="margin: 10px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">summer 2021</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href="https://halelabnitk.github.io/index.html" target="_blank"><img src="images/HALE_Lab_Logo.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">2020 - 2022</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://research.samsung.com/sri-b' target='_blank' style="width: 55px"><img src="images/srib.jpeg" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">summer 2020</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://chaoss.community/' target='_blank' style="width: 55px"><img src="images/chaoss.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">summer 2020</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://iris.nitk.ac.in/about_us' target='_blank' style="width: 55px"><img src="images/iris.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">2019 - 2020</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.nitk.ac.in/' target='_blank' style="width: 55px"><img src="images/nitk.png" height="80" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">2018 - 2022<br>B.Tech</div> </div> <div class="tile"> <a href='https://www.npsinr.com/' target='_blank' style="width: 55px"><img src="images/npsi.png" height="90" style="margin: 20px; background: white" /></a> <div class="caption">2007 - 2018 <br>school</div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <hr>  <button style="border:0px transparent; background-color: transparent;outline:none;" type="button" class="collapsible" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#content-news" id="news"> <heading>Highlights</heading> </button> <div id="content-news"> <table border=0 class="bg_colour" style="padding:20px;width:100%;border:0px;border-spacing:0px;border-collapse:separate;margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;"> <tbody>  <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Jan '25</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> <a href="https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/CRMArena">CRMArena</a> and <a href="https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/xLAM">xLAM</a> are accepted in NAACL 2025<a href=""></a>! </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Sep '24</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Our <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01687">paper</a> on understanding the factors influencing CoT is accepted at EMNLP Findings 2024. </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Jun '24</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Joined <a href="https://www.salesforceairesearch.com/">Salesforce Research</a> as an Applied Scientist. </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Sep '23</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/five-princeton-students-named-2024-siebel-scholars">Named a Siebel Scholar</a> (Class of 2024)! </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Jun '23</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Joining Microsoft as an Applied Scientist intern with the Ads team. </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Jan '23</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Invited for <a href="https://www.citadel.com/careers/students/the-data-open/">Citadel Security Women's Datathon</a> 2023 final onsite held in Miami, FL. </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Oct '22</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Awarded Institute Gold medal by <a href="https://www.nitk.ac.in/"> National Institute of Technology Karnataka</a> for securing highest GPA in my batch. </td> </tr>   <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Feb '22</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Awarded <a href="https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-22/" target="_blank">AAAI 2022</a> Student Scholarship. </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Jan '22</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> My Bachelors thesis work is accepted in <a href="https://ee-ciss.princeton.edu/" target="_blank">CISS 2022</a>! </td> </tr>          </tbody> </table> </div> <hr class="soft">  <button style="border:0px transparent; background-color: transparent;outline:none;" type="button" class="collapsible" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#content-publications" id="publications"> <heading>Publications</heading> </button> <div id="content-publications"> <table style="width:100%;border:0px;border-spacing:0px;border-collapse:separate;margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-bottom: auto;"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments </papertitle></big> <br> <em> Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025) </em> <br> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02305">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/CRMArena" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <br> Kung-Hsiang Huang, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Sidharth Dhawan, Yixin Mao, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems </papertitle></big> <br> <em>Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025) </em> <br> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03215">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/xLAM" target="_blank">[Code]</a>  <br> Jianguo Zhang*, Tian Lan*, Ming Zhu*, Zuxin Liu*, Thai Hoang*, Shirley Kokane, Weiran Yao, Juntao Tan, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Haolin Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Yihao Feng, Tulika Awalgaonkar, Rithesh Murthy, Eric Hu, Zeyuan Chen, Ran Xu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding </papertitle></big> <br> <a href="">[Preprint]</a> <br> Haolin Chen, Yihao Feng, Zuxin Liu, Weiran Yao, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Shelby Heinecke, Ricky Ho, Phil Mui, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>SpecTool: A Benchmark for Characterizing Errors in Tool-Use LLMs </papertitle></big> <br> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13547">[Preprint]</a>  <br> Shirley Kokane, Ming Zhu, Tulika Awalgaonkar, Jianguo Zhang, Thai Hoang, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Zuxin Liu, Tian Lan, Juntao Tan, Rithesh Murthy, Liangwei Yang, Zhiwei Liu, uan Carlos Niebles, Huan Wang, Shelby Heinecke, Caiming Xiong </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>LoRA Soups: Merging LoRAs for Practical Skill Composition Tasks </papertitle></big> <br> <em>International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) - Industry </em> <br> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13025">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/aksh555/LoRA-Soups" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <a href="data/COLING25-LoRASoups-Poster.pdf" target="_blank">[Poster]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Yuanzhi Li, Karthik Narasimhan, Sham Kakade, Eran Malach, Samy Jelassi </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Deciphering the Factors Influencing the Efficacy of Chain-of-Thought: Probability, Memorization, and Noisy Reasoning </papertitle></big> <br> <em>Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024 Findings); also in BlackboxNLP 2024 </em> <br> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01687">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/aksh555/deciphering_cot" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <a href="data/EMNLP24-Deciphering_CoT.pdf" target="_blank">[Poster]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Thomas L. Griffiths, R. Thomas McCoy </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Exploring Reasoning and Interactive Benchmarking of Language Models </papertitle></big> <br> <em>M.S.E. Thesis, Princeton Univeristy (2024) </em> <br> <a href="data/MSE_Thesis_2024.pdf">[Thesis]</a> <a href="data/mse_thesis_slides.pdf" target="_blank">[Slides]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong> </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Language Models as Science Tutors </papertitle></big> <br> <em>International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024); also in Data-Centric Machine Learning Research Workshop @ ICLR 2024 </em> <br> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11111">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/princeton-nlp/LM-Science-Tutor" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <br> Alexis Chevalier, Jiayi Geng, Alexander Wettig, Howard Chen, Sebastian Mizera, Simon Machado, Arturo Rodriguez Fanlo, Simon Frieder, Zirui Wang, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Jiachen T. Wang, Xindi Wu, Mengzhou Xia, Wenhan Xia, Jiatong Yu, Ellie Thieu, Max Aragon, Zhiyong Ren, Junjie Zhu, Toni Annala, Sanjeev Arora, Danqi Chen </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedback </papertitle></big> <br> <em>Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) - Datasets and Benchmarks </em> <br> <a href="data/NeurIPS23-InterCode.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/princeton-nlp/intercode" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <a href="data/NeurIPS23-InterCode-Poster.pdf" target="_blank">[Poster]</a> <br> John Yang<strong></strong>, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao </td> </tr> <tr>  <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Language Agents as Hackers: Evaluating Cybersecurity Skills with Capture the Flag </papertitle></big> <br> <em>Multi-Agent Security Workshop @ Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) </em> <br> <a href="data/MASec2023-Language_Agents_Hackers.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/princeton-nlp/intercode" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <a href="data/MASec2023-Hackers.pdf" target="_blank">[Poster]</a> <br> John Yang<strong></strong>, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Shunyu Yao, Kexin Pei, Karthik Narasimhan <br> <strong> <award>Best Paper Award</award> </strong> </td> </tr> <br> <tr>  <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Commonsense and Named Entity Aware Knowledge Grounded Dialogue Generation </papertitle></big> <br> <em>North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2022)</em> <br> <a href="data/NAACL22-CNTF.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/deekshaVarshney/CNTF" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IaLqhgb-H3BzETqHlsY3whSkgcD3HvAJ82nLl8bHfjI/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">[Slides]</a> <br> Deeksha Varshney, <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Asif Ekbal </td> </tr> <tr>  <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Neural Language Modeling of Unstructured Clinical Notes for Automated Patient Phenotyping </papertitle></big> <br> <em>56th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS 2022)</em> <br> <a href="data/CISS22-Phenotyping.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-b_0KFhRX0DsEAVilU67Os4BYj5o8Mun/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109195542332940300776&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank">[Slides]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong><strong></strong>, Shidharth S<strong></strong>, Sowmya Kamath S </td> </tr> <tr>  <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>CL-NERIL: A Cross-Lingual Model for NER in Indian Languages </papertitle></big> <br> <em>36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022) - Student Poster </em> <br> <a href="data/AAAI22-CL-NERIL.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://github.com/aksh555/CL-NERIL" target="_blank">[Code]</a> <a href="data/AAAI22-Poster.pdf" target="_blank">[Poster]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Gouri Sankar Majumder, Ashish Anand <br> <strong> <award>Student Scholarship Award</award> </strong> </td> </tr> <tr>  <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Diagnostic Code Group Prediction by Integrating Structured & Unstructured Clinical Data</papertitle></big> <br> <em>9th International Conference on Big Data Analytics (BDA 2021)</em> <br> <a href="data/BDA21-ICD_coding.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fohp0O6iyMhw1O4m1FrSV5FMLOQI20mQ/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">[Video]</a> <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rc0pVfO_ck3BN_oj2Qz7vnOjGgLXkVWz/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109195542332940300776&rtpof=true&sd=true" target="_blank">[Slides]</a> <br> <em> A short version was accepted at the Young Researchers' Symposium of ACM India KDD CoDS-COMAD 2021</em>! <br> <a href="data/CoDS-COMAD2021-ICD-9.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bn8uePuzufu0ybm0m9R3RKfoflGNtAhz8It_2ILP8F0/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">[Slides]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar*</strong>, Shidharth S*, Gokul S Krishnan and Sowmya Kamath S </td> </tr> <tr>  <td style="padding:1.5%;width:75%;vertical-align:top"> <papertitle><big>Study of a Hybrid Approach Towards Malware Detection in Executable Files</papertitle></big> <br> <em>6th International Conference on Cyber Security and Privacy in Communication Networks 2020 <br> Published in Springer Nature Computer Science journal Volume 2 </em> <br> <a href="data/SNComputerScience2021-Malware.pdf" target="_blank">[Paper]</a> <br> <strong>Akshara Prabhakar</strong>, Bhawana Rudra </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <hr class="soft"> <button style="border:0px transparent; background-color: transparent;outline:none;" type="button" class="collapsible" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#content-teaching" id="teaching"> <heading>Teaching / Mentoring</heading> </button> <div id="content-teaching"> <table border=0 class="bg_colour" style="padding:20px;width:100%;border:0px;border-spacing:0px;border-collapse:separate;margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Teaching Assistant</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Co-head TA, <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall22/cos324/">COS 324: Intro to Machine Learning</a> @ Princeton (Spring '24, Fall '23, Spring '23, Fall '22) </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p style="display:inline"><b>Open-Source Mentor</b> &nbsp</p> </td> <td> Mentor at <a href="https://github.com/ceph/ceph">Ceph</a> organization during GHC 2024. </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </tbody> </table> <a href="#" id="back-to-top" aria-label="Back to Top">⇧</a> <script src="js/script.js"></script> </body> <br><br><br> <footer style="display: flex; justify-content: space-between; align-items: center; padding: 10px; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; font-size: 14px"> <span>© 2025 Akshara Prabhakar. 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