Akari Asai

Curriculum Vitae
akariasai.github.io/
akari@cs.washinton.edu+1 (650)-334-9945

University of Washington
185 E Stevens Way NE
Seattle, WA 98195-2350

Education
09/2019 – University of Washingtonpresent Ph.D. in Computer Science
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Hannaneh Hajishirzi
03/2019 University of Tokyo
B.E. in Information and Communication Engineering (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Department of Engineering
Supervisor: Kiyoharu Aizawa
Major GPA: 3.90/4, Cumulative GPA: 3.83
1st in Class (1/133), Dean’s Award, Best Undergraduate Thesis Award
08/2015 – University of California, Berkeley
05/2016 American and International Study Program (AISP), Department of Political Science

Employment
09/2019 – University of Washingtonpresent Ph.D. Student, Paul G Allen School of Computer Science and Engineeringwith Hannaneh Hajishirzi
09/2023 – FAIR, Meta
present Visiting Student Researcher
with Scott Yih
07/2022 – FAIR, Meta
02/2023 Research Internwith Scott Yih, Sebastian Riedel
06/2021 – Allen Institute for AI
12/2021 Research Internwith Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Matt Gardner
04/2019 – Salesforce Research
08/2020 Research Internwith Kazuma Hashimoto, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher
09/2018 – Microsoft Research Asia
01/2019 Research Internwith Nan Duan, Duyu Tang

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 1

03/2017 – Megagon Lab
05/2017 Research Internwith Alon Y. Halevy

Selected Awards, Grant and Fellowship2024 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Japan
2024 Amazon Research Grant
2024 Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research2023 Best Paper Honorable Mention at NeurIPS 2023 Instruction-tuning Workshop
2023 Outstanding Paper Award at Annual Meeting of Japanese Association for NLP
2023 Best Video Award (Most Viewed) ACL 2023
2023 Stability AI HPC Cluster Research Grant
2023 Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research2022 EECS Rising Stars
2022 The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship2019 The Dean’s Award, Best Undergraduate Thesis Award at University of Tokyo
2019 The Young Researcher Award at Anual Meeting of Japanese Association for NLP
2019 The Nakajima Foundation Doctoral Studying Abroad Scholarship (2019-2022)
2017 Women Techmakers Scholarship (Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship)Peer-Reviewed Conference Publications
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gqB4u wAAAAJ&hl=en
Semantic Scholar: https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Akari-Asai/35584853[C26] Rulin Shao, Jacqueline He, Akari Asai, Weijia Shi, Tim Dettmers, Sewon Min, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh. Scaling Retrieval-Based Language Models with a Trillion-Token Datastore. In Proceedings of Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). 2024. [pdf][C25] Tong Chen, Akari Asai∗ , Niloofar Mireshghallah∗ , Sewon Min, James Grimmelmann, Yejin
Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh. CopyBench: Measuring Literaland Non-Literal Reproduction of Copyright-Protected Text in Language Model Generation.
In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2024.
[pdf]

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 2

[C24] Abhika Mishra, Akari Asai, Vidhisha Balachandran, Yizhong Wang, Graham Neubig, Yulia
Tsvetkov, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing forLanguage Models. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Modeling (COLM). 2024. [pdf][C23] Akari Asai, Sneha Kudugunta, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Machel Reid,
Yulia Tsvetkov, Sebastian Ruder, Hannaneh Hajishirzi. BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer. In Proceedings of Annual Conference of theNorth American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2024. [pdf]Oral Presentation[C22] Akari Asai, Zeqiu Wu, Yizhong Wang, Avirup Sil, Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Self-RAG: Learning
to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection. In Proceedings of International Conference on Learning Representations. 2024. [pdf]Oral Presentation (Top 1% among 7k submissions)
Most Influential ICLR 2024 Papers No. 13 (Paper Digest)
Best Paper Honorable Mention at NeurIPS Instruction Workshop
Features in Forbes
2k Github Stars[C21] Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Yoichi Takahashi, Ronan Le Bras, Akari Asai, Xinyan Yu,Dragomir Radev, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi, Kentaro Inui. RealTime QA: What’s the Answer
Right Now?. In Proceedings ofeurIPS (Datasets and Benchmarks). 2023. [pdf][C20] Joongwon Kim, Akari Asai, Gabriel Ilharco, Hannaneh Hajishirzi. TaskWeb: Selecting Better
Source Tasks for Multi-task NLP. In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (EMNLP). 2023. [pdf][C19] Sheng-Chieh Lin, Akari Asai, Minghan Li, Barlas Oguz, Jimmy Lin, Yashar Mehdad, Wen-tau
Yih, Xilun Chen. How to Train Your DRAGON: Diverse Augmentation Towards Generalizable
Dense Retrieval. In Proceedings of Findings of EMNLP. 2023. [pdf][C18] Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen R. Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, SebastianRuder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, ..., Akari Asai ... (52 authors).
AfriQA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages. In Proceedings of Findings of EMNLP. 2023. [pdf][C17] Alex Mallen∗ , Akari Asai∗ , Victor Zhong, Rajarshi Das, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, DanielKhashabi. When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness and Limitationsof Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories. [pdf] In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of
the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Oral Presentation
ACL 2023 Best Video Award (Most Viewed)
Most Influential ACL 2023 Paper No 14 (Paper Digest)[C16] Akari Asai, Timo Schick, Patrick Lewis, Xilun Chen, Gautier Izacard, Sebastian Riedel, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Wen-tau Yih. Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions. In Proceedings of Findings of ACL. 2022. [pdf][C15] Xiaoyu Shen, Akari Asai, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert. xPQA: Cross-Lingual Product Question Answering across 12 Languages. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (ACL; Industry track). 2022. [pdf]Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 3

[C14] Akari Asai, Mohammadreza Salehi, Matthew E. Peters, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Attentional
Mixtures of Soft Prompt Tuning for Parameter-efficient Multi-task Knowledge Sharing. In
Proceedings of 2Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022. [pdf][C13] Xinyan Yu∗ , Akari Asai∗ , Trina Chatterjee, Junjie Hu, Eunsol Choi. Beyond Counting
Datasets: Investigating Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources. Findingsof EMNLP. 2022. [pdf][C12] Akari Asai, Matt Gardner, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Evidentiality-guided Generation forKnowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. In Proceedings of Annual Conference of the North American
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2022. [pdf]Oral Presentation[C11] Akari Asai, Xinyan Yu, Jungo Kasai, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. One Question Answering
Model for Many Languages with Cross-lingual Dense Passage Retrieval. In Proceedings ofConference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). 2021. [pdf][C10] Takumi Kawashima, Qina Yu, Akari Asai, Daiki Ikami, Kiyoharu Aizawa. The aleatoric uncertainty estimation using a separate formulation with virtual residuals. In Proceedings ofInternational Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2021. [pdf][C9] Akari Asai and Eunsol Choi. Challenges in Information Seeking QA: Unanswerable Questions and Paragraph Retrieval. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for
Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2021. [pdf][C8] Ikuya Yamada, Akari Asai and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Efficient Passage Retrieval with Hashing
for Open-domain Question Answering In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Associationfor Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2021. [pdf][C7] Akari Asai, Jungo Kasai, Jonathan H. Clark, Kenton Lee, Eunsol Choi, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. In Proceedings of Annual
Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).
2021. [pdf]Oral Presentation[C6] Alon Talmor, Ori Yoran, Amnon Catav, Dan Lahav, Yizhong Wang, Akari Asai, Gabriel Ilharco, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Jonathan Berant. MultiModalQA: complex question answeringover text, tables and images. In Proceedings of International Conference on Learning Representations(ICLR). 2021. [pdf][C5] Ikuya Yamada, Akari Asai, Hiroyuki Shindo, Hideaki Takeda, and Yuji Matsumoto. LUKE:
Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention. In Proceedingsof Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2020. [pdf]Most Influential EMNLP 2020 Paper No.8 (Paper Digest)
1.3 million downloads at Hugging face
700+ Github Stars

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 4

[C4] Ikuya Yamda, Akari Asai, Jin Sakuma, Hiroyuki Shindo, Hideaki Takeda, Yoshiyasu Takefuji,and Yuji Matsumoto. Wikipedia2Vec: An Optimized Tool for Learning Embeddings of Words
and Entities from Wikipedia. In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, demo). 2020. [pdf]400k PyPI Install1k+ Github starts[C3] Akari Asai and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Logic-guided Data Augmentation and Regularization
for Consistent Question Answering. In Proceedings of The Annual Conference of the Association
for Computational Linguistics (ACL; Short). 2020. [pdf][C2] Akari Asai, Kazuma Hashimoto, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Richard Socher, and Caiming Xiong.
Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graphs for Question Answering. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020. [pdf]Featured in VentureBeat
Featured in Towards Datascience (Top Trends of Graph Machine Learning in 2020)
Integrated into Salesforce COVID Search (CO-Search)[C1] Akari Asai, Sara Evensen, Behzad Golshan, Alon Halevy, Vivian Li, Andrei Lopatenko,
Daniela Stepanov, Yoshihiko Suhara, Wang-Chiew Tan, and Yinzhan Xu. HappyDB: A Corpusof 100,000 Crowdsourced Happy Moments In Proceedings of International Conference on Language
Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2018. [pdf]Featured in MIT Technology Review

Preprint[P4] Zora Zhiruo Wang∗ , Akari Asai∗ , Xinyan Velocity Yu, Frank F. Xu, Yiqing Xie, Graham Neubig, Daniel Fried. CodeRAG-Bench: Can Retrieval Augment Code Generation?. Under review.
2024. [pdf][P3] Go Kamoda, Akari Asai, Ana Brassard, Keisuke Sakaguchi. Quantifying the Influence ofEvaluation Aspects on Long-Form Response Assessment. Under review. 2024.
Outstanding Paper at Annual Meeting of the Japanese Association for NLP[P2] Akari Asai, Zexuan Zhong, Danqi Chen, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Wen-tau Yih. Reliable, Adaptable, and Attributable Language Models with Retrieval.
2024. [pdf][P1] Akari Asai, Akiko Eriguchi, Kazuma Hashimoto, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka. Multilingual extractive reading comprehension by runtime machine translation. 2018. [pdf]Tutorials[T1] Akari Asai, Sewon Min, Zexuan Zhong, Danqi Chen. Retrieval-based Language Models andApplications. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL; Tutorial). 2023.

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 5

Workshop Publications[W3] Akari Asai, Shayne Longpre, Jungo Kasai, Chia-Hsuan Lee, Rui Zhang, Junjie Hu, IkuyaYamada, Jonathan H. Clark, Eunsol Choi. MIA 2022 Shared Task: Evaluating Cross-lingual
Open-Retrieval Question Answering for 16 Diverse Languages. In Proceedings of Workshop on
Multilingual Information Access (MIA). 2022. [pdf][W2] Akari Asai, Daiki Ikami, and Kiyoharu Aizawa. Multi-task Learning Based on Separable
Formulation of Depth Estimation and Uncertainty. In Proceedings of Conference on Computer
Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Visual Learning. 2019.
[W1] Akari Asai, Vivian Li, Daniela Stepanov, and Wang-Chiew Tan. A Data-Driven Approach toUnderstanding Happiness. In Proceedings of ACL Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP). 2018.

Teaching
Head TA at Courses
Winter 2024 CSE599J Data-centric ML (Graduate)
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Instructor: Pang Wei Koh
Fall 2023 CSE473 Artificial Intelligence (Undergradate)
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Instructor: Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Conference Tutorial Instructor
July 2023 Tutorial on Retrieval-based LMs and Applications
The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Co-instructors: Sewon Min, Zexuan Zhong, Danqi Chen

Invited Lecturer at CoursesFall 2024 CS 769 Advanced Natural Language Processing
Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Instructor: Junjie He
Fall 2024 CS 11-667 Large Language Models: Methods and Applications
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Instructor: Daphne Ippolito and Chenyan Xiong
Spring 2024 CPSC 477/577 Natural Language Processing
Department of Computer Science, Yale University
Instructor: Arman Cohan

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 6

Spring 2024 CS 11-711 Advanced NLP
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Instructor: Graham Neubig
Spring 2024 CSE 561A: Large Language Models
Department of Computer Science, Washington University in St. Louis
Instructor: Jiaxin Huang
Winter 2024 CSE 447 Natural Language Processing
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Instructor: Yejin Choi
Fall 2023 CSE 473 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Instructor: Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Winter 2023 CSE 447 Natural Language Processing
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Instructor: Sofia Serrano
Fall 2022 CSE 373 Data Structures and Algorithm
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
Instructor: Kevin Lin

Mentoring
04/2022 – Public Office hour
09/2024 Virtual office hours open to public (Two 30 minutes 1-on-1 sessions every week)
More than 90 students joined to discuss research and Ph.D. applications

PhD Students
03/2024 – Tong Chen
present UW CSE Ph.D. student (advised by Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Luke Zettlemoyer)
EMNLP 24
09/2023 – Daniel Kim
07/2024 PhD student (advised by Hannaneh Hajishirzi)
EMNLP 23

Predoctoral Students
01/2023 – Abhika Mishra
present UW CSE Undergraduate Student
COLM 24
01/2023 – Go Kamodapresent Tohoku University Master Student

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04/2022 – Alex Mallen
06/2023 UW CSE Undergraduate Student → Research Engineer at Eleuther AI
ACL 23 (Best Video Award and Oral Presentation)
Outstanding Senior Student Award
04/2021 – Velocity Yu
06/2022 UW CSE Undergraduate Student → Ph.D. Student at University Southern California
NeurIPS 21; Findings of EMNLP 23; NAACL 2024

ServiceAcademic Services within the University2021-2023 Ph.D. Admission Student Area Chair (NLP)
Paul G. Allen School of Compuer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
2021-2023 Ph.D. Admission Committee MemberPaul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
2022 – 2023 Diversity and Inclusion Committee Student Representative
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
2022 – 2023 Faculty Hiring Student DEI Reviewer
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
2022 Ph.D. Pre-Application Mentorship Service (PAMS) Mentor
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
2023 – present UW NLP Seminar Organizer
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
2023: Chenhao Tan, Tri Dao, He He, Tatsu Hashimoto, Jacob Andreas, Chelsea Finn
2024: Yoon Kim, Peter Henderson, John Hewitt, Diyi Yang, Daphne Ippolito

Research Community
07/2022 Workshop Lead Organizer
NAACL 2022 Workshop on Multilingual Information Access
07/2022 Shared Task Lead Organizer
NAACL 2022 MIA Shared Task on Multilingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering
07/2023 Tutorial Co-Instructor
ACL 2023 Tutorial on Retrieval-based Language Models and Applications
2022 – present Organizing Committee
NAACL 2022 Student Volunteer Coordinator

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 8

2023 – present Area ChairEMNLP 2024
EMNLP 2023
EACL 2023
2020 – present Reviewer
ACL Rolling Review (ARR) 2021-present
ACL 2020-2023
EMNLP 2019-2023
NeurIPS 2021-2024
NeurIPS Dataset and Benchmark 2024
ICLR 2021-2024
AKBC 2020
AAAI 2020
IJCAI 2021
COLM 2024
EMNLP 2024 WiNLP
EMNLP 2024 Big Picture Workshop
ICLR 2024 ME-FoMo Workshop

Selected Media Coverage
07/2024 Forbes. How RAG-Powered AI Applications Have A Positive Impact On Businesses [link]
02/2024 LangChain Blog. Self-Reflective RAG with LangGraph [link]
11/2023 Towards Data Science. How Self-RAG Could Revolutionize Industrial LLMs [link]
10/2022 Allen School News. Lost in translation no more: IBM Fellowship winner Akari Asai asks — andanswers — big questions in NLP to expand information access to all [link]
02/2020 Towards Data Science. Top Trends of Graph Machine Learning in 2020 [link]
02/2020 VentureBeat. Salesforce’s AI navigates Wikipedia to find answers to complex questions [link]
02/2018 MIT Technology Review. 100,000 happy moments – What makes people happy? A huge database ismaking it possible to discern the answer at last. [link]

Invited Talks
01/2025 University of Pittsburgh, CS Colloquium Series (hosted by Xiang Lorraine Li)
11/2024 MIT Technology Review Japan
11/2024 Carnegie Mellon University, WInE Lab (hosted by Sherry Tongshuang Wu)
05/2024 Microsoft Research India (hosted by Srivathsan Koundinyan)

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 9

05/2024 National Institutes of Health (NIH) (hosted by Zhiyong Lu, Ashley Shin)
03/2024 Meta, Smart Glass AI Reading Group (hosted by Kai Sun)
02/2024 University College London, Web Intelligence Group (hosted by Emine Yilmaz)
12/2023 Microsoft Research, Health Futures team (hosted by Naoto Usuyama)
07/2021 Allen School Open House, NLP Research Showcase
10/2023 The University of Edinburgh, Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (hosted byPapsquale Minervanie)
10/2023 University of Massachusetts Amherst Machine Learning and Friends Lunch (hosted by DhruvAgarwal)
08/2023 Preferred Networks (hosted by Daisuke Okanohara)
08/2023 Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (hosted by Makoto Yamada)
08/2023 University of Tokyo, Multi Media Processing Group (hosted by Kiyoharu Aizawa)
08/2023 The University of Queensland Data Science Seminar Series (hosted by Guido Zuccon)
07/2023 The First International Workshop on Retrieval-enhanced Machine Learning at SIGIR, KeynoteTalk (hosted by Hamed Zamani)
07/2023 Japanese NLP colloquium (hosted by Naoki Otani)
04/2023 MILA, NLP Reading Group (hosted by Siva Reddy)
03/2023 The AI TAL (hosted by Jingkang Yang)
12/2022 The AI King, Keynote Talk (hosted by Jun Suzuki)
08/2022 Amazon Alexa (hosted by Qiang Ning)
10/2021 University of Amsterdam, Search Engines Amsterdam (hosted by Maarten de Rijke)
07/2021 Apple, Web Answers (hosted by Shayne Longpre)
04/2021 Japanese NLP colloquium (hosted by Naoki Otani)
01/2021 Apple, Web Answers (hosted by Shayne Longpre)
01/2021 Google Research (hosted by Markus N. Rabe, Christian Szegedy)

Akari Asai — curriculum vitae, page 10