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. Research Fellow at IIT Bhubaneswar (with Dr. Shreya Ghosh). CS junior at KIIT University (GPA 9.73/10). Published at ICCV 2025 and IJCNLP-AACL 2025.
Experience
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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 across 7 scaffolds and 5 frontier models.
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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, Machine Learning, 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 NeurIPS 2025 DCVLR Challenge — #6/59
NeurIPS 2025
Team Blackwell ranked 6th out of 59 teams (top 10th percentile).