Akari Asai

I am an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute, with an affiliate appointment in the Machine Learning Department and a research scientist at Allen Institute for AI.

Please read the FAQ before emailing me if you’re interested in working with me.

I build language models and agents that can go beyond their training data and operate reliably in the world, especially on open-ended, long-horizon tasks involving search, evidence synthesis, and interaction with external tools and environments.

• AI beyond training data: Retrieval, search, and agents. We develop models and agents that seek out and use external information, from retrieval-augmented language models to deep research agents for complex, open-ended tasks.
  DR Tulu (ICML 2026 Oral) · Self-RAG (ICLR 2024 Oral) · AgentIR · Task-aware Retriever · DRAGON · PathRetriever

• Reliable AI in the wild. We study when AI systems fail as they interact with real-world information and tools, including hallucinations, copyright and licensing issues, and unreliable reasoning, and develop methods to improve reliability.
  Binary RAR (ICML 2026 Oral) · When Not to Trust LMs · FAVA · CopyBench · REALTIMEQA

• AI for Science. We build AI systems that help scientists search, synthesize, and reason over scientific knowledge, with the longer-term goal of supporting open-ended scientific research and discovery.
  OpenScholar (Nature 2026) · AI Reviewer · Soohak

Across these directions, I am also interested in making language technologies work across languages and cultures, especially for global information access. XOR QA · CORA · AfriQA · PANGEA

Selected recognitions: 2026 AI2050 Early Career Fellowship · 2025 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award · MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 · Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in Science

Previously, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2025, advised by Hannaneh Hajishirzi, where I worked on retrieval-augmented language models and information-seeking systems. My dissertation focused on building and advancing the foundations of retrieval-augmented language models (thesis, video), and received the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. Prior to UW, I received my B.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where I received the Dean’s Medal.