Akari Asai
Research Scientist @ Allen Institute for AI
Incoming Assistant Professor @ Carnegie Mellon University

I am an incoming Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Fall 2026-), affiliated with the Language Technologies Institute and (by courtesy) the Machine Learning Department and a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (2025-2026).
I’ve completed my Ph.D. in NLP at Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Hannaneh Hajishirzi. I was also spending time at Meta AI Research as a visiting student researcher, under the supervision of Dr. Wen-tau Yih. Prior to joining UW, I obtained a B.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from The University of Tokyo, Japan.
My research focuses on natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on large language models (LLMs). I investigate the core limitations of LLMs—such as hallucinations—that cannot be overcome by scaling alone. To address these challenges, my Ph.D. pioneered Retrieval-Augmented LMs, a novel class of LLMs that integrate large-scale text data via retrieval during inference. My PhD thesis is available: thesis (PDF), vieo (youtube). In summary, my Ph.D. focused on
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Establishing the Necessity of Retrieval-Augmented LMs – I systematically identified LLM failure modes and pioneered retrieval-augmented approaches to address them. My research demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing hallucinations (ACL 2023), enabling more compute-efficient scaling (NeurIPS 2024), and supporting real-time knowledge updates (NeurIPS DB 2023). I led the first tutorial on this area at ACL 2023.
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Building the Foundations of Retrieval-Augmented LMs – I established key components of Retrieval-Augmented LMs, developing new architectures and training/inference strategies (ICLR 2024; , NAACL 2022;COLM 2024). I advanced retrieval systems for flexibility (Findings of ACL 2023), robustness to complex queries (ICLR 2020; Findings of EMNLP 2023; EMNLP 2020), and more efficiency (ACL 2021).
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Making Real-world Impacts through Retrieval-Augmented LMs – I apply Retrieval-Augmented LMs to real-world challenges, including expert-domain tasks such as Science (Open Scholar, 2025) or code generation (Findings of NAACL 2025), and multilingual information access (NeurIPS 2021; NAACL 2021; Findings of EMNLP, 2022; NAACL 2023; ACL 2023 (industry), empowering broader communities to access reliable information.
My work has received multiple paper awards at conferences like ACL and NeurIPS workshop, and has been featured in major media outlets such as Forbes and MIT Technology Review. I’m honored to be named among the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in Science , MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 from Japan (2024), EECS Rising Stars (2022), and the IBM Global Ph.D. Fellows (2022-2023). My work is now integrated into major libraries like Hugging Face, LlamaIndex and LangChain, and used in multiple real-world systems, such as COVID-19 Research Search. Most recently, we released Ai2 OpenScholar Public Demo, assisting more than 30k scientists across scientific disciplines to synthesize scientific literature more effectively and efficiently.
Public office hours and application materials:
To help lower barriers to starting research, pursuing a Ph.D. in this field or job search, I host weekly office hours open to all every Friday. Feel free to sign up via (please sign up from Google Calendar!).
Inspired by many wonderful friends who have shared their own materials to promote equity and access, I’ve also made my past application materials available:
- Academic job application (2024): [Research Statement], [Teaching Statement], [Diversity Statement], [Job Talk Slides], [Job Talk Video (defense recording)]
- EECS Rising Stars (2022): [Research Statement]
- PhD application (2018): [SoP draft] (Note: This is a near-final draft, as I don’t have access to the original version. For examples of CS Statements of Purpose, I recommend checking out cs-sop, which includes many CS SoP of previous applicants!)
news
Jul 15, 2025 | I’ll be joining Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2026, affiliated with the Language Technologies Institute and (by courtesy) the Machine Learning Department! From July 2025 to August 2026, I’ll be a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI! |
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Jun 15, 2025 | I’ve completed my Ph.D! My Ph.D. thesis is available here and you can see the video of my defense on Youtoube. |
May 30, 2025 | I’m organizing the COLM 2025 Workshop on LLMs for Science as well as the NeurIPS 2025 Competition on Retrieval-Augmented Generation in the Real World. Stay tuned for more updates - we’d love to have you involved! |
May 15, 2025 | Honored to be named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 in Science! |
May 02, 2025 | I gave invited talks at NAACL Repl4NLP and Foundation Models for Science Workshop at Flatiron Institute. |
selected publications
See my full publications at the publication page!