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Akshara Prabhakar


Hi 👋! I am a Senior Applied Scientist at Salesforce AI Research, where I work on training, benchmarking, and understanding the cognitive aspects of language agents, with a focus on applied, product-driven research that addresses real-world challenges.

I received my MS in Computer Science from Princeton University, where I was advised by Prof. Karthik Narasimhan. At Princeton, I was part of the Princeton NLP group and collaborated closely with the PLI and CoCoSci labs, exploring intersections of language, reasoning, and cognition.

I was named a Siebel Scholar (Class of 2024). Prior to grad school, I graduated as a Gold Medalist from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, where I worked with Dr. Sowmya Kamath on machine learning for healthcare applications.


    I am fortunate to have studied and worked at some wonderful places!

jun 2024 - now
summer 2023
2022 - 2024
MS
summer 2022
summer 2021
2021
summer 2021
2020 - 2022
summer 2020
summer 2020
2019 - 2020
2018 - 2022
B.Tech
2007 - 2018
school

Nov '25  

 ⭐ Checkout Enterprise Deep Research — 🔍 Dynamic multi-agent planning • 🧩 Enterprise-grade tooling

May '25  

 xLAM-2.0 models powered by APIGen-MT are public!

Feb '25  

 Gave an invited talk "Is Chain-of-Thought a Sign of True Reasoning in LLMs?" on YouTube!

Jan '25  

 CRMArena and xLAM are accepted in NAACL 2025.

Sep '24  

 Our paper on understanding the factors influencing CoT is accepted at EMNLP Findings 2024.

Jun '24  

 Joined Salesforce Research as an Applied Scientist.

Sep '23  

 Named a Siebel Scholar (Class of 2024)!

Jun '23  

 Joining Microsoft as an Applied Scientist intern with the Ads team.

Jan '23  

 Invited for Citadel Security Women's Datathon 2023 final onsite held in Miami, FL.

Oct '22  

 Awarded Institute Gold medal by National Institute of Technology Karnataka for securing highest GPA in my batch.

Feb '22  

 Awarded AAAI 2022 Student Scholarship.

Enterprise Deep Research: Steerable Multi-Agent Deep Research for Enterprise Analytics
Agentic AI Applications for Enterprise Tasks Workshop @ Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
[Paper] [Code]
Akshara Prabhakar, Roshan Ram, Zixiang Chen, Silvio Savarese, Frank Wang, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang, Weiran Yao
UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agents
Scaling Environments for Agents Workshop @ Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
[Paper] [Code]
Cheng Qian, Zuxin Liu, Akshara Prabhakar, Zhiwei Liu, Jianguo Zhang, Haolin Chen, Heng Ji, Weiran Yao, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang
APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplay
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025) - Datasets and Benchmarks
[Paper] [Project] [Poster]
Akshara Prabhakar*, Zuxin Liu*, Ming Zhu, Jianguo Zhang, Tulika Awalgaonkar, Shiyu Wang, Zhiwei Liu, Haolin Chen, Thai Hoang, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Weiran Yao, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
Coverage: VentureBeat, CIO, Yahoo Finance, MarkTechPost, Official Blog
CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments
Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025)
[Paper] [Code]
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Akshara Prabhakar, Sidharth Dhawan, Yixin Mao, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu
Coverage: ZDNet, VentureBeat, Official Blog
xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems
Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025)
[Paper] [Code]
Jianguo Zhang*, Tian Lan*, Ming Zhu*, Zuxin Liu*, Thai Hoang*, Shirley Kokane, Weiran Yao, Juntao Tan, Akshara Prabhakar, 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
Coverage: Investing.com, InfoWorld, VentureBeat, Official Blog
Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding
[Preprint]
Haolin Chen, Yihao Feng, Zuxin Liu, Weiran Yao, Akshara Prabhakar, Shelby Heinecke, Ricky Ho, Phil Mui, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang
LoRA Soups: Merging LoRAs for Practical Skill Composition Tasks
International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) - Industry
[Paper] [Code] [Poster]
Akshara Prabhakar, Yuanzhi Li, Karthik Narasimhan, Sham Kakade, Eran Malach, Samy Jelassi
Deciphering the Factors Influencing the Efficacy of Chain-of-Thought: Probability, Memorization, and Noisy Reasoning
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024 Findings); also in BlackboxNLP 2024
[Paper] [Code] [Poster]
Akshara Prabhakar, Thomas L. Griffiths, R. Thomas McCoy
Exploring Reasoning and Interactive Benchmarking of Language Models
M.S.E. Thesis, Princeton Univeristy (2024)
[Thesis] [Slides]
Akshara Prabhakar
InterCode: Standardizing and Benchmarking Interactive Coding with Execution Feedback
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) - Datasets and Benchmarks
[Paper] [Code] [Poster]
John Yang, Akshara Prabhakar, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao
Coverage: MarktechPost
Language Agents as Hackers: Evaluating Cybersecurity Skills with Capture the Flag
Multi-Agent Security Workshop @ Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)
[Paper] [Code] [Poster]
John Yang, Akshara Prabhakar, Shunyu Yao, Kexin Pei, Karthik Narasimhan
Best Paper Award
Commonsense and Named Entity Aware Knowledge Grounded Dialogue Generation
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2022)
[Paper] [Code] [Slides]
Deeksha Varshney, Akshara Prabhakar, Asif Ekbal
Neural Language Modeling of Unstructured Clinical Notes for Automated Patient Phenotyping
56th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS 2022)
[Paper] [Slides]
Akshara Prabhakar, Shidharth S, Sowmya Kamath S
CL-NERIL: A Cross-Lingual Model for NER in Indian Languages
36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022) - Student Poster
[Paper] [Code] [Poster]
Akshara Prabhakar, Gouri Sankar Majumder, Ashish Anand
Student Scholarship Award

Teaching Assistant  

 Co-head TA, COS 324: Intro to Machine Learning @ Princeton (Spring '24, Fall '23, Spring '23, Fall '22)

Open-Source Mentor  

 Mentor at Ceph organization during GHC 2024.
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