Papers by Keerthiram Murugesan
X-FACTOR: A Cross-metric Evaluation of Factual Correctness in Abstractive Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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Subhajit Chaudhury, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Chulaka Gunasekara, Maxwell Crouse, Srinivas Ravishankar, Daiki Kimura, Keerthiram Murugesan, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Tahira Naseem, Pavan Kapanipathi, Alexander Gray
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models produce factually inconsistent summaries that are not supported by the original article. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-aware filtering mechanism that improves the factuality of abstractive summarization models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of training data and the factuality of generated summaries. |
Are Large Language Models Effective in Clinical Trial Design? A Study on Baseline Feature Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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Nafis Neehal, Bowen Wang, Shayom Debopadhaya, Corey Curran, Keerthiram Murugesan, Soham Dan, Vibha Anand, Kristin Bennett
| Challenge: | Clinical trials require baseline features to characterize participants and ensure accurate study outcomes. |
| Approach: | They evaluate LLMs' ability to generate appropriate baseline features for clinical trials . they use CT-Repo and CT-Pub datasets to generate features from clinical trials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of the baseline feature generation model on a clinical trial. |
Towards Aligning Language Models with Textual Feedback (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using textual feedback, language models can be trained to learn from textual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that aligns language models with user preferences expressed in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms PPO on toxicity reduction, summarization, and dialog response tasks while achieving the same performance with only 20% of the samples. |
Interpretable Graph-Language Modeling for Detecting Youth Illicit Drug Use (2026.findings-eacl)
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Yiyang Li, Zehong Wang, Zhengqing Yuan, Zheyuan Zhang, Keerthiram Murugesan, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Illicit drug use among teens and young adults remains a public health concern . existing models ignore latent and interconnected structures among survey variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint graph-language modeling framework to detect illicit drug use among TYAs . they use large-scale surveys such as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health to analyze data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on YRBS and NSDUH datasets in predictive accuracy. |
OjaKV: Context-Aware Online Low-Rank KV Cache Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxuan Zhu, David H. Yang, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Keerthiram Murugesan, Tejaswini Pedapati, Pin-Yu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference use static, offline-learned subspaces that perform poorly under distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a storage policy with an online subspace adaptation to preserve key-value tokens in full rank as high-fidelity anchors. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that OjaKV maintains or improves zero-shot accuracy at high compression ratios, achieving the strongest gains on long-context benchmarks requiring complex reasoning. |
EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning (2024.eacl-long)
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Kinjal Basu, Keerthiram Murugesan, Subhajit Chaudhury, Murray Campbell, Kartik Talamadupula, Tim Klinger
| Challenge: | Text-based games (TBGs) combine natural language understanding with reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual reinforcement learning that integrates natural language with reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline agents on TWG and TWC games. |
AgentRouter: A Knowledge-Graph-Guided LLM Router for Collaborative Multi-Agent Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Zheyuan Zhang, Kaiwen Shi, Zhengqing Yuan, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma, Keerthiram Murugesan, Vincent Galassi, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to agent routing emphasize cost efficiency while overlooking the fine-grained contextual and relational structure inherent in QA tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates multi-agent QA as a knowledge-graph-guided routing problem supervised by empirical performance signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines while generalizing across benchmarks and LLM backbones. |
ZoomR: Memory Efficient Reasoning through Multi-Granularity Key Value Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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David H. Yang, Yuxuan Zhu, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Keerthiram Murugesan, Tejaswini Pedapati, Subhajit Chaudhury, Pin-Yu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models generate long chain of thoughts but memory footprint grows with output length . prior work on KV cache optimization focused on compressing long input context . |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that compresses verbose reasoning thoughts into summaries . they use a dynamic KV cache selection policy that leverages these summary keys . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces memory usage while avoiding full-cache attention at each step. |
STARLING: Self-supervised Training of Text-based Reinforcement Learning Agent with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing environments for text-based RL are domain-specific or time-consuming to generate and do not train the agents to master a specific set of skills. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive environment for self-supervised RL that bootstraps the text-based RL agents with automatically generated games to boost their generalization capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed environment bootstraps the agents with automatically generated games to boost their generalization capabilities to reach a goal of the target environment. |
MISMATCH: Fine-grained Evaluation of Machine-generated Text with Mismatch Error Types (2023.findings-acl)
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Keerthiram Murugesan, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Soham Dan, Subhajit Chaudhury, Chulaka Gunasekara, Maxwell Crouse, Diwakar Mahajan, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Achille Fokoue, Pavan Kapanipathi, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for machine text are inadequate to capture quality of text . a recent study has focused on task-specific evaluation metrics or on properties of machine-generated text based on mismatch errors . |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation scheme based on fine-grained mismatch errors . they propose 13 mismatch error types to guide the model for better prediction of human judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation scheme is based on mismatch errors in 7 NLP tasks . the mismatch error types guide the model for better prediction of human judgments . |
NGQA: A Nutritional Graph Question Answering Benchmark for Personalized Health-aware Nutritional Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Zheyuan Zhang, Yiyang Li, Nhi Ha Lan Le, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma, Vincent Galassi, Keerthiram Murugesan, Nuno Moniz, Werner Geyer, Nitesh V Chawla, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Diet plays a critical role in human health, but tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates dietary reasoning using a national health survey data set. |
| Outcome: | The NGQA benchmark evaluates dietary reasoning across three tasks using a set of question complexity settings and baseline models. |
Context Attribution with Multi-Armed Bandit Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augmenting attribution with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) focus on training models to explicitly cite context segments during generation, but their reliability remains unverifiable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates context attribution as a combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem by using Linear Thompson Sampling to efficiently identify the most influential context segments while minimizing the number of model queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model queries by 30% while matching or exceeding the attribution quality of existing approaches. |
On the Effects of Fine-tuning Language Models for Text-Based Reinforcement Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Text-based reinforcement learning is a form of interactive fiction where players manipulate the environment using text and admissible actions in natural language. |
| Approach: | They show that rich semantic understanding leads to efficient training of text-based RL agents . they also show that semantic degeneration occurs when LMs are inappropriately fine-tuned . |
| Outcome: | The results suggest that semantic understanding is not important for the task . they also show that fine-tuning language models can degenerate the agent's performance . |
Granite Guardian: Comprehensive LLM Safeguarding (2025.naacl-industry)
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Inkit Padhi, Manish Nagireddy, Giandomenico Cornacchia, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Pierre Dognin, Keerthiram Murugesan, Erik Miehling, Martín Santillán Cooper, Kieran Fraser, Giulio Zizzo, Muhammad Zaid Hameed, Mark Purcell, Michael Desmond, Qian Pan, Inge Vejsbjerg, Elizabeth M. Daly, Michael Hind, Werner Geyer, Ambrish Rawat, Kush R. Varshney, Prasanna Sattigeri
| Challenge: | a suite of advanced models is designed to detect and mitigate risks associated with prompts and responses. |
| Approach: | a team of researchers develop a model family to detect and mitigate risks associated with prompts and responses. the model family is based on the Granite 3.0 language models. |
| Outcome: | a new model family is designed to detect and mitigate risks associated with prompts and responses. |
NG-Router: Graph-Supervised Multi-Agent Collaboration for Nutrition Question Answering (2026.eacl-long)
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Kaiwen Shi, Zheyuan Zhang, Zhengqing Yuan, Keerthiram Murugesan, Vincent Galassi, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Existing methods for nutrition question answering face limited reasoning capacity and contextual overload . poor dietary patterns are associated with more than 11 million deaths in 2017 . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables supervised multi-agent collaboration for nutritional QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines in multi-agency reasoning tasks. |
Learning Symbolic Rules over Abstract Meaning Representations for Textual Reinforcement Learning (2023.acl-long)
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Subhajit Chaudhury, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Daiki Kimura, Prithviraj Sen, Keerthiram Murugesan, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Michiaki Tatsubori, Achille Fokoue, Pavan Kapanipathi, Asim Munawar, Alexander Gray
| Challenge: | Existing text-based reinforcement learning agents use embeddings as representations for observation and are fed to an action scorer for predicting the next action. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel neurosymbolic agent that combines a semantic parser and a rule induction system to learn interpretable rules as policies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms deep learning-based methods on established text-based game benchmarks on unobserved games and on unseen games. |
Protecting Users From Themselves: Safeguarding Contextual Privacy in Interactions with Conversational Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Ivoline C. Ngong, Swanand Ravindra Kadhe, Hao Wang, Keerthiram Murugesan, Justin D. Weisz, Amit Dhurandhar, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy
| Challenge: | Conversational agents are increasingly woven into individuals’ personal lives, yet users underestimate the privacy risks associated with them. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to reformulate out-of-context information in user prompts by identifying and reformulating out- of-content information in the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve strong gains in contextual privacy while preserving the user’s intended interaction goals. |
Efficient Text-based Reinforcement Learning by Jointly Leveraging State and Commonsense Graph Representations (2021.acl-short)
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Keerthiram Murugesan, Mattia Atzeni, Pavan Kapanipathi, Kartik Talamadupula, Mrinmaya Sachan, Murray Campbell
| Challenge: | Text-based games (TBGs) are useful benchmarks for evaluating progress in grounded language understanding and reinforcement learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose an agent that induces a graph representation of the game state and jointly grounds it with a commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline agents in the proposed game . |
Language Guided Exploration for RL Agents in Text Environments (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Real-world sequential decision making is characterized by sparse rewards and large decision spaces. |
| Approach: | They introduce a language-based framework that provides decision-level guidance to an RL agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms vanilla RL agents on ScienceWorld in 2022. |