Ishika Agarwal

I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Dr. Dilek Hakkani-Tür and Dr. Gokhan Tur.

I work on data curation for LLMs: selecting or generating informative data. I also have a side interest in multilinguality: why don’t models know the same information across all languages and how can we avoid that?

I’m going to Budapest for EMNLP, to present A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats!

I’m looking for internships for Summer 2027!

Selected work

All publications →

arXiv 2026

LLMs Get Smarter from Targeted Synthetic Multilingual Data

Ishika Agarwal, Arkajyoti Charaborty, Tanner Sorensen, Neha Gupta, Andreas Stolcke

Paper

arXiv 2026

AcquisitionSynthesis: Targeted Data Generation using Acquisition Functions

Ishika Agarwal, Sofia Stoica, Emre Can Acikgoz, Pradeep Natarajan, Mahdi Namazifar, Jiaqi Ma, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

NeurIPS 2025

Neural Networks for Learnable and Scalable Influence Estimation of Instruction Fine-Tuning Data

Ishika Agarwal, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

arXiv 2025

Language Specific Knowledge: Do Models Know Better in X than in English?

Ishika Agarwal*, Nimet Beyza Bozdag*, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

ICLR 2025

DELIFT: Data Efficient Language Model Instruction Fine-Tuning

Ishika Agarwal, Krishna Killamsetty, Lucian Popa, Marina Danilevsky

News

Aug 2026 New preprint: LLMs Get Smarter from Targeted Synthetic Multilingual Data, from my time at Amazon.
Summer 2026 Interned at Uniphore as a Research Scientist Intern.
May 2026 New preprint: AcquisitionSynthesis — using acquisition functions as reward models for synthetic data generation.
Jan 2026 New preprint: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats — MTQE rewards for idiom translation.
Dec 2025 Selected as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2025.
Nov 2025 Passed my PhD qualification exam! 🎉
Sep 2025 NN-CIFT was accepted at NeurIPS 2025 ⛵
Summer 2025 Interned at Amazon Prime Video on the Content Localization team.