Vardhan Dongre
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I am advised by Dilek Hakkani-Tür.
Research
My work sits at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. I am particularly interested in conversational generative agents that interact with both the digital and physical world for real applications — how they keep track of context over long interactions, how they coordinate with people and with each other, and how we can tell when they are going wrong.
I am a member of the ConvAI Lab at UIUC. Previously, I have been affiliated with the AIFARMS Institute. My work has been generously supported by gifts and grants from Amazon Science, Adobe Research, NSF, and DARPA.
Interests: Conversational Agents / Multimodal Reasoning / Alignment & Control of LLMs / Interactive Physical Intelligence
Selected Publications
All publications →The full list includes workshop papers and preprints. Also on Google Scholar.
Notes
All notes →Academic Service
Workshops & organizing
- Organizer, Human–Robot Dialogue Workshop at IROS 2026 · Pittsburgh, Oct 1, 2026
- Program Committee, Evaluating and Advancing Spatial Intelligence through Games, special session at IEEE CoG 2026 · Madrid, Sep 1–4, 2026
- Session Co-chair (Machine Learning, Generative AI & Signal Processing), CSL Student Conference 2026 · UIUC
Reviewing
ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, CoRL, SIGDIAL, TACL, RA-L