Dhruv Agarwal
Affiliation:
I am a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I am advised by Prof. Andrew McCallum as part of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL). My research focuses on building systems to support search, discovery, and decision-making in real-world scientific workflows using machine learning and natural language processing, incorporating Bayesian reasoning.
To this end, my work introduces epistemological LLMs–systems that continuously ingest evidence, update beliefs, and propose promising hypotheses to accelerate open-ended scientific discovery (in the spirit of our lab’s past vision for EpiKBs).
Currently, I am also part of the Aristo team at Ai2 as a student researcher working on autonomous scientific discovery with Bodhisattwa Majumder, Ashish Sabharwal, and Peter Clark.
As of 2025, I have moved back to India. Please reach out if you’d like to connect about my research/AI4Science, collaborate, or just say hi!
Mentoring
- Peter Phan (Fall 2024 – Present) → Applying for Ph.D. programs in ML/NLP for Fall 2026 (highly recommend!)
- Reece Adamson, Satvika Reddy Gavireddy, Megha Chakravorty (Spring 2025)
- Aditya Parashar (Fall 2023 – Fall 2024)
- Varad Pimpalkhute (Summer 2024)
- Abhinava Maddha (Summer 2023)
- Aneri Rana, Sriharsha Hatwar (Spring 2023)
- Pragya Prakash (Fall 2022)
Reviewing
ICLR 2024–2026 · AAAI 2026 · NeurIPS 2024–2025 · ICML 2024–2025 · ARR (June 2024) · ACL 2024 · EMNLP 2023
Machine Learning and Friends Lunch (MLFL)
I co-organize the Machine Learning and Friends Lunch seminar series at UMass Amherst. We are always on the lookout for exciting (especially early-career) speakers. Please reach out if you would like to present or have a speaker recommendation!
News
| Dec 2025 | Traveling to San Diego 🏖️ for NeurIPS! Please reach out if you want to meet up or catch me at our poster for AutoDiscovery (earlier: “AutoDS”). |
|---|---|
| Nov 2025 | Gave a talk at Microsoft Research (India) on building Epistemological LLMs for scientific discovery. Thanks for hosting, Niket! |
| Nov 2025 | Gave a talk at Google DeepMind (India) on building Epistemological LLMs for scientific discovery. Thanks for hosting, Prateek! |
| Sep 2025 | AutoDS accepted to NeurIPS 2025! |
| Aug 2025 | New preprint! MiGrATe: Mixed-Policy GRPO for Adaptation at Test-Time. |
| Jun 2025 | New preprint! Open-ended Scientific Discovery via Bayesian Surprise (AutoDS). |
| Jun 2025 | Started a summer internship at Ai2 Aristo in Seattle with Bodhi Majumder, Peter Clark, and Ashish Sabharwal, and will continue as a student researcher into 2026. |
| Jan 2025 | Two papers (DiscoveryBench and BOPRO) accepted to ICLR 2025! |
| Jan 2025 | Moved back to India 🇮🇳! Please reach out if you would like to meet up! |
| Jul 2024 | New preprint! DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models. |
| Jun 2024 | Started a summer internship at Amazon AWS AI Labs in New York with Rajarshi Das. |
| May 2024 | Position: Data-driven Discovery with Large Generative Models accepted to ICML 2024! |
| Mar 2024 | BYOKG accepted to NAACL 2024 (Findings) and LLM Agents workshop at ICLR 2024! |
| Feb 2024 | New preprint! Data-driven Discovery with Large Generative Models. |
| Nov 2023 | New preprint! BYOKG: Self-Supervised Program Synthesis for Zero-shot KGQA. |
| Oct 2023 | CBR-MRC accepted to EMNLP 2023 (Findings)! Selected for a poster at the main conference. |
| Jun 2023 | Started a summer internship at Amazon AWS AI with Rajarshi Das and Sopan Khosla. |
| May 2023 | New preprint! Machine Reading Comprehension using Case-based Reasoning (CBR-MRC). |
| Nov 2022 | Published a patent with Oracle Hospitality on an AI-based system for room assignment. |
| Sep 2022 | Joined the Computer Science Ph.D. program at UMass Amherst! |
| Jul 2022 | Presented ArboEL at NAACL in Seattle, WA. Recording. |
| May 2022 | Started a summer internship at Oracle Labs (East) with Ari Kobren. |
| May 2021 | Started a summer internship at the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL) with Nicholas Monath and Rico Angell. |
| Feb 2021 | Joined the Computer Science M.S. program at UMass Amherst! |
| Jul 2020 | Left Oracle Hospitality’s AI and Data Science team after 4.5 years. |
| Oct 2019 | Filed 2 patent applications with Oracle Hospitality. |