CV
Arka Mukherjee — Undergraduate researcher in multimodal LLMs and VLM evaluation.
Contact Information
| Name | Arka Mukherjee |
| Professional Title | Undergraduate Researcher |
| arka.mukherjee078@gmail.com |
Professional Summary
Undergraduate researcher focused on multimodal LLM evaluation, reasoning benchmarks, and AI agents. Summer research intern at USC (Interaction Lab, with Prof. Maja Matarić) and Research Fellow at IIT Bhubaneswar (with Dr. Shreya Ghosh). CS senior at KIIT University (GPA 9.73/10). Published at ICCV 2025 and IJCNLP-AACL 2025.
Experience
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2026 - Los Angeles, CA
IUSSTF-Viterbi Summer Research Intern
University of Southern California
Advisor: Prof. Maja Matarić (Interaction Lab)
- Multimodal Social Engagement: building novel pipelines that combine long-video understanding and agentic techniques to improve engagement detection with VLMs.
- Contributed to lab infrastructure for LLM inference.
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2026 - 2026 Remote
Research Intern
Carnegie Mellon University
Advisor: Dr. Min Xu
- Applied GRPO, DPO, and PPO to study RL generalization to low-sampling decoding tasks (64-token action space).
- Improved VRAM efficiency and iterated GRPO training on 800k+ datapoints.
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2024 - Bhubaneswar, India
Undergraduate Research Fellow (Funded)
IIT Bhubaneswar
Advisor: Dr. Shreya Ghosh
- Developed mmJEE-Eval, a 1,460-problem multimodal STEM reasoning benchmark evaluating 17 VLMs. Discovered metacognitive barriers: VLMs detect 53% of errors but correct only 3.5%. (IJCNLP-AACL 2025 Findings)
- Created the first evaluation framework for VLM cultural competence via multimodal story generation on 5 VLMs. (Oral @ ICCV 2025 ASI Workshop)
- Proposed ICE, a new evaluation paradigm modeling real-world tasks; engineered novel harnesses to improve frontier agentic terminal-coding performance (CoTDL-mini-SWE-agent).
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2025 - 2025 Ropar, India
Summer Research Fellow (IASc-INSA-NASI)
IIT Ropar
Advisor: Dr. Sudarshan Iyengar
- Developed EduVLM-Bench for STEM prerequisite detection and evaluated 5 open-source LLMs. Top model (Gemma3 27B) achieved 38.5% accuracy.
Education
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2023 - 2027 Bhubaneswar, India
B.Tech CSE
Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT)
Computer Science and Systems Engineering
- Agentic AI, Probability & Statistics, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, AI, Algorithms, Data Mining, Human-Computer Interaction
Publications
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2025 Toward Socially Aware Vision-Language Models: Evaluating Cultural Competence Through Multimodal Story Generation
ICCV 2025 Workshop on Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) — Oral
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2025
Awards
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2025 KIIT Merit Scholar (Dean's List)
KIIT University
Top 0.8% of CS batch. Awarded for 5 consecutive semesters.
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2026 IUSSTF-Viterbi Scholar
IUSSTF / University of Southern California
One of 15 students selected from India for a research position at USC.
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2026 Amgen Scholars Program
Amgen Foundation
Selected for the Amgen Scholars Summer Research Program (declined).
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2026 Aalto Science Institute (AScI) Summer Research Fellow
Aalto University, Finland
Selected for a summer research position in Finland (declined).
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2025 D&I Subsidy Award ($750)
IJCNLP-AACL 2025
Travel grant for presenting at IJCNLP-AACL 2025.
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2025 AI Grants India
AI Grants India
API keys and compute credits to support research.
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2025 NeurIPS 2025 DCVLR Challenge — #6/59
NeurIPS 2025
Team Blackwell ranked 6th out of 59 teams (top 10th percentile).