Vardhan Dongre

Ph.D. Student & AI Researcher

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I am advised by Vikram S. Adve and Dilek Hakkani-Tür. I also closely collaborate with Gokhan Tur and John F. Reid.

Portrait of Vardhan Dongre

Research

My work lies at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. I am particularly interested in conversational generative agents that can interact with both the digital and physical world for real-world applications.

I am affiliated with the AIFARMS Institute and a member of the ConvAI Lab at UIUC. My work has been generously supported by gifts and grants from Amazon Science, Adobe Research, NSF, and DARPA.

Interests

News

2026 · 04
Joining Amazon Science, Alexa team in the upcoming Fall.
2026 · 01
Joining Adobe Research this summer in the Intelligent Agents & Assistants team.
2025 · 11
“Drift No More? Context Equilibria in Multi-Turn LLM Interactions” awarded Oral Spotlight at the AAAI 2026 Trustworthy Agents and Personalization for Foundation Models workshops.
2025 · 11
MIRAGE Benchmark accepted at NeurIPS 2025.

Selected Publications

2025
MIRAGE: A Benchmark for Multimodal Information-Seeking and Reasoning in Agricultural Expert-Guided Conversations
Vardhan Dongre, Chi Gui, Shubham Garg, Hooshang Nayyeri, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Vikram S. Adve. NeurIPS, 2025.  paper · code · leaderboard
2025
Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems
Mert İnan, Anthony Sicilia, Suvodip Dey, Vardhan Dongre, et al. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025.  paper · code
2024
ReSpAct: Harmonizing Reasoning, Speaking, and Acting Towards Building Large Language Model-Based Conversational AI Agents
Vardhan Dongre, Xiaocheng Yang, Emre Can Acikgoz, Suvodip Dey, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür. IWSDS, 2024 (Oral).  paper · code

A full list is available on Google Scholar and my CV.

Mentoring

I am always interested in mentoring highly-motivated undergraduate and master's students in ECE/CS. If you are at UIUC (preferred) and want to discuss project ideas or research opportunities, please feel free to reach out.

Contact

Email
vdongre2 [at] illinois [dot] edu
Office
Siebel Center for Computer Science, UIUC
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Scholar
Google Scholar
GitHub
github.com/vardhandongre
X
@vardhan_dongre