Vardaan Pahuja

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yu Su. I previously earned an M.Sc. in Computer Science (thesis track) from Université de Montréal, affiliated with Mila. Before beginning my doctoral studies, I worked as a Software Engineer at IBM India Research Lab in Bangalore. I hold a Bachelor of Technology (Honours) from IIT Kharagpur, where I was awarded the prestigious Institute Silver Medal. I have also had the privilege of spending three summers as a research intern at Microsoft Research, Google Brain, and Bosch AI Research.

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News

[Jan 2026] One paper accepted to ICLR 2026.
[Oct 2025] Recognized as top reviewer at NeurIPS 2025.
[Oct 2025] Presented Explorer at OSU Graduate Engineering Research Symposium.
[June 2025] Serving as emergency Area Chair for ACL ARR May 2025.
[May 2025] My internship work Explorer is accepted to ACL (Findings) 2025.
[Feb 2025] The preprint for my internship project at Microsoft Research is now available on arXiv [Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents].
[July 2024] Our work Reviving the Context: Camera Trap Species Classification as Link Prediction on Multimodal Knowledge Graphs has been accepted to CIKM'24.
[April 2024] Interning at Microsoft Research, Redmond this summer.
[Aug 2023] Our work A Retrieve-and-Read Framework for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction has been accepted to CIKM'23.
[June 2023] Our work SalsaBot: Towards a Robust and Generalizable Embodied Agent has been accepted to Embodied AI workshop at CVPR 2023.
[May 2023] My internship work @ Google Brain is accepted to Transformers for Vision (T4V) workshop, CVPR 2023.
[Feb 2023] Our team Salsabot has qualified to enter the semifinals of Alexa Prize Simbot Challenge.
[Oct 2022] Attending Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC) at London, UK.
[April 2022] Interning at Google Brain this summer.
[May 2021] Long paper accepted to ACL 2021 (Oral).
[March 2021] Interning at Bosch AI Research this summer.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in LLM agents, multimodal foundation models, and KB reasoning, with a central focus on the role of structure in modern multimodal machine learning. Broadly, I study how leveraging structure, either inherent (e.g., knowledge graphs) or deliberately synthesized (e.g., web interaction trajectories), can make multimodal systems more robust, generalizable, and interpretable. My work integrates visual signals, language, and structured knowledge to enhance representation and reasoning (ACL'21, CIKM'23, CIKM'24) as well as interactive web environments (ACL (Findings)'25). I also work on computer-use agents and LLM interpretability, including the use of sparse autoencoders to analyze salient latent structure in dense image representations (ICLR'26). My earlier work spans complex sequential question answering over knowledge graphs (AAAI'18) and multi-task sequence labeling with recurrent neural networks (Interspeech'17).

Publications

Automatic Image-Level Morphological Trait Annotation for Organismal Images

Vardaan Pahuja, Samuel Stevens, Alyson East, Sydne Record, Yu Su

[pdf] [code] [dataset] [website] ICLR 2026

Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents

Vardaan Pahuja^*, Yadong Lu^*, Corby Rosset, Boyu Gou, Arindam Mitra, Spencer Whitehead, Yu Su, Ahmed Awadallah

[pdf] [website] ACL (Findings) 2025
[poster] OSU CSE Graduate Student Research Poster Exhibition 2025

Reviving the Context: Camera Trap Species Classification as Link Prediction on Multimodal Knowledge Graphs

Vardaan Pahuja, Weidi Luo, Yu Gu, Cheng-Hao Tu, Hong-You Chen, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Charles Stewart, Song Gao, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su

[pdf] [code] CIKM 24 (Oral)
[poster] Honourable Mention, OSU CSE Graduate Student Research Poster Exhibition 2024
[short version] CV4Animals workshop, CVPR 24 (Oral)

A Retrieve-and-Read Framework for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

Vardaan Pahuja, Boshi Wang, Hugo Latapie, Jayanth Srinivasa, Yu Su

[pdf] [code] [blog] CIKM 23 (Oral)

Diversifying Tokenization paper thumbnail

Diversifying Joint Vision-Language Tokenization Learning

Vardaan Pahuja, AJ Piergiovanni, Anelia Angelova

[pdf] [poster] [website] Transformers for Vision workshop, CVPR 2023

Fine-Tuning is Fine, if Calibrated

Zheda Mai^*, Arpita Chowdhury^*, Ping Zhang^*, Cheng-Hao Tu, Hong-You Chen, Vardaan Pahuja, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Song Gao, Charles Stewart, Yu Su, Wei-Lun Chao

[pdf] NeurIPS 2024

Holistic Transfer: Towards Non-Disruptive Fine-Tuning with Partial Target Data

Cheng-Hao Tu, Hong-You Chen, Jike Zhong, Zheda Mai, Vardaan Pahuja, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Song Gao, Charles Stewart, Yu Su, Wei-Lun Chao

[pdf] NeurIPS 2023

Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Semantic Parsing Perspective

Yu Gu, Vardaan Pahuja, Gong Cheng, Yu Su

[pdf] AKBC 2022

Systematic Investigation paper thumbnail

A Systematic Investigation of KB-Text Embedding Alignment at Scale

Vardaan Pahuja, Yu Gu, Wenhu Chen, Mehdi Bahrami, Lei Liu, Wei-Peng Chen and Yu Su

[pdf] [code] [slides] ACL 2021 (Oral)
[poster] Also presented at AKBC 22.

Structure Learning for Neural Module Networks

Vardaan Pahuja, Jie Fu, Sarath Chandar, Christopher J Pal

[pdf] [code] [slides] LANTERN workshop, EMNLP 2019

Complex Sequential Question Answering: Towards Learning to Converse Over Linked Question Answer Pairs with a Knowledge Graph

Amrita Saha^*, Vardaan Pahuja^*, Mitesh M. Khapra, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Sarath Chandar

[pdf] [code] [website] [slides] AAAI 2018

Joint Correlated Sequence paper thumbnail

Joint Learning of Correlated Sequence Labeling Tasks Using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

Vardaan Pahuja^*, Anirban Laha^*, Shachar Mirkin, Vikas Raykar, Lili Kotlerman, Guy Lev

[pdf] [code] Interspeech 2017

Learning a Probabilistic Boolean Network Model from Biological Pathways and Time-series Expression Data

Vardaan Pahuja, Ritwik Kumar Layek, Pabitra Mitra

[paper] EMBC 16

SalsaBot: Towards a Robust and Generalizable Embodied Agent

Chan Hee Song, Jiaman Wu, Ju-Seung Byeon, Zexin Xu, Vardaan Pahuja, Goonmeet Bajaj, Samuel Stevens, Ziru Chen, Yu Su

[short version] Embodied AI Workshop at CVPR 2023
[long version] Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge Proceedings 2023

Learning Sparse Mixture of Experts for Visual Question Answering

Vardaan Pahuja, Jie Fu, Christopher J Pal

[pdf] Visual Question Answering and Dialog Workshop, CVPR 2019

Tooling framework for instantiating natural language querying system

Manasa Jammi, Jaydeep Sen, Ashish Mittal, Sagar Verma, Vardaan Pahuja, Rema Ananthanarayanan, Pranay Lohia, Hima Karanam, Diptikalyan Saha, Karthik Sankaranarayanan

[pdf] VLDB Endowment 2018

Talks

Apr 24, 2026

Automatic Image-Level Morphological Trait Annotation for Organismal Images

ICLR 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

[slides]

Apr 10, 2026

Attention Residuals

OSU NLP group

[slides]

Jun 12, 2025

Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents

ACL 2025, Vienna, Austria

[slides]

Mar 25, 2025

Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents

Research Trends forum

[slides]

Feb 23, 2025

DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines

OSU NLP group

[slides]

Jun 17, 2024

Bringing Back the Context: Camera Trap Species Identification as Link Prediction on Multimodal Knowledge Graphs

CV4Animals Workshop, CVPR 2024, Seattle, WA

[slides]

Oct 12, 2023

A Retrieve-and-Read Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning

CIKM 2023, Birmingham, UK

[slides]

Nov 8, 2021

Learning Contextualized Knowledge Structures for Commonsense Reasoning

OSU, CSE 6539

[slides]

Nov 3, 2021

Introduction to NLP

Guest lecture, OSU, CSE 6521

[slides]

Nov 4, 2020

Query2Box: Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space

OSU, CSE 5539

[slides]

Sep 9, 2020

DistilBERT, a Distilled Version of BERT: Smaller, Faster, Cheaper and Lighter

OSU, CSE 5539

[slides]

Service

Area Chair: ARR/EMNLP'25
Program Committee: NeurIPS'25, AAAI'25, ICCV'25, ACL'25, NAACL'25, CVPR'25, WACV'25, COLM'24, CVPR'24, EMNLP'23, ACL'23, NAACL'22, Transactions on Big Data'24
Workshops: Workshop on Computer-use Agents (ICML'25), CV4Animals (CVPR'24), Knowledge Augmented Methods for NLP (AAAI'23), Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration (NAACL'22)
Secondary Reviewer: BigData-IT'22, EMNLP'21; SIGKDD'21; ACL'21; SIGKDD'20

Awards

Honorable Mention Award for Poster, OSU CSE Graduate Student Research Poster Exhibition 2024

Institute Silver Medal, IIT Kharagpur – Best academic performance at graduation 2016

Prof. J.C. Ghosh Memorial Prize, IIT Kharagpur – Best academic performance (VI semester) 2015

International Symposium (Microwave and Comm.) 1981 Prize, IIT Kharagpur – Best academic performance (VI semester) 2015

Class of 1970 Alumni (US) Association Prize, IIT Kharagpur – Best academic performance in Institute (IV semester) 2014

IIT Kharagpur Alumni (California Chapter) Award, IIT Kharagpur – Best academic performance in Institute (IV semester) 2014

National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) – Award of scholarship under NTSE 2008