My work broadly lies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and is strongly motivated by applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enterprise settings. In particular, I focus on modeling users’ intents and preferences—what NLP often refers to as pragmatics—and on designing the system-level apparatus needed for LLMs to remain pragmatically grounded when deployed in complex, error-prone real-world environments.

I have pursued this agenda from multiple complementary angles. This includes studying mechanisms for planning and reasoning in the large, ambiguous action spaces typical of enterprise settings (e.g., ICML 2026, ACL 2024ICLR 2024EMNLP 2021); analyzing how dataset characteristics affect LLMs’ capacity to perform expert-level tasks (e.g., EMNLP 2025VIS 2024EMNLP 2022); and examining the extent to which the behaviors learned by LLMs faithfully capture those of domain experts (e.g., CHI 2025VIS 2024COLING 2025).

Looking forward, I am particularly excited about the design of agent-based systems that support the workflows of teams rather than individual users (e.g., ACL 2026 or here at Adobe Research’s blog). This includes scenarios in which multiple stakeholders collaborate toward a shared goal—such as designers, art directors, copywriters, and brand managers working together on campaign briefs—moving beyond the conventional single-user paradigm that dominates current AI systems.

Beyond publications, my research has shipped into production features in two flagship Adobe Experience Cloud products, now in use by multiple Fortune 100 companies. I contributed to the design and deployment of custom LLMs for question answering in AEP AI Assistant (covered by granted patents: US Patent App. 18/486,603; 18/485,204; 18/504,256; 18/589,065; 18/612,566) and for automated insight generation in CJA Intelligent Captions (covered by granted patents: US Patent App. 18/338,033; 18/321,602), considered Adobe Experience Cloud’s first GenAI feature when it went live in 2023. Overall, I have co-authored more than 30 patent filings on novel AI methods since 2015.

Prospective Interns

In addition to collaborating with outstanding full-time researchers and stakeholders on the design of these methods, I have also had the privilege of mentoring interns who were true rising stars. Here is a selection of them:

  1. Lin Ai (2025 intern, from Columbia University)
  2. Jiale Liu (2025 intern, from Pennsylvania State University)
  3. Neha Srikanth (2024 intern, from University of Maryland)
  4. Minsoo Kim (2023 intern, from Seoul National University)

If you have published work in competitive venues that aligns with what we do at Adobe Research and are considering applying for a summer internship, I’d be happy to hear from you. Feel free to reach out at {first_name}.{second_last_name}@adobe.com and share a short description of your papers.

Publications

An Interactive Paradigm for Deep Research

Ai, Lin., Bursztyn, Victor., Chen, Xiang., Hirschberg, Julia., Mitra, Saayan. (Jul. 6, 2026)

ICML 2026

TeamFusion: Supporting Open-ended Teamwork with Multi-Agent Systems

Liu, Jiale., Bursztyn, Victor., Ai, Lin., Wang, Haoliang., Choudhary, Sunav., Mitra, Saayan., Wu, Qingyun. (Jul. 5, 2026)

ACL 2026

Disambiguation in Conversational Question Answering in the Era of LLM: A Survey

Tanjim, Mehrab., In, Yeonjun., Chen, Xiang., Bursztyn, Victor., Rossi, Ryan., Kim, Sungchul., Ren, Guang-Jie., Muppala, Vaishnavi., Jiang, Shun., Kim, Yongsung., Park, Chanyoung. (May. 18, 2025)

arXiv

A Case Study of Human-Authored versus Automatic Dashboard Summaries

Hoffswell, Jane., Bursztyn, Victor., Guo, Shunan., Koh, Eunyee. (Apr. 28, 2025)

ACM CHI 2025 LBW

Comprehensive Sketching: Exploring Infographic Design Alternatives in Parallel

Shi, Xinyu., Guo, Shunan., Hoffswell, Jane., Chan, Gromit., Bursztyn, Victor., Zhao, Jian., Koh, Eunyee. (Apr. 26, 2025)

CHI 2025

Detecting Ambiguities to Guide Query Rewrite for Robust Conversations in Enterprise AI Assistants

Tanjim, Mehrab., Chen, Xiang., Bursztyn, Victor., Bhattacharya, Uttaran., Mai, Tung., Muppala, Vaishnavi., Maharaj, Akash., Mitra, Saayan., Koh, Eunyee., Li, Yunyao., Russell, Ken. (Feb. 1, 2025)

arXiv

A Flash in the Pan: Better Prompting Strategies to Deploy Out-of-the-Box LLMs as Conversational Recommendation Systems

Carvalho, Gustavo., Benigeri, Simon., Healey, Jennifer., Bursztyn, Victor., Demeter, David., Birnbaum, Lawrence. (Jan. 19, 2025)

International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)

How Aligned are Human Chart Takeaways and LLM Predictions? A Case Study on Bar Charts with Varying Layouts

Wang, Huichen., Hoffswell, Jane., Thane, Sao., Bursztyn, Victor., Bearfield, Cindy. (Oct. 13, 2024)

IEEE VIS 2024

Representing Charts as Text for Language Models: An In-Depth Study of Question Answering for Bar Charts

Bursztyn, Victor., Hoffswell, Jane., Guo, Shunan., Koh, Eunyee. (Oct. 13, 2024)

IEEE VIS 2024 (short paper)

Data Pictorial: Deconstructing Raster Images for Data-Aware Animated Vector Posters

Zhou, Tongyu., Chan, Gromit., Guo, Shunan., Hoffswell, Jane., Xiao, Chang., Bursztyn, Victor., Koh, Eunyee. (Oct. 13, 2024)

UIST 2024 Adjunct

RaDA: Retrieval-augmented Web Agent Planning with LLMs

Kim, Minsoo., Bursztyn, Victor., Koh, Eunyee., Guo, Shunan., Hwang, Seung-won. (Aug. 11, 2024)

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

ToolChain*: Efficient Action Space Navigation in Large Language Models with A* Search

Zhuang, Yuchen., Chen, Xiang., Yu, Tong., Mitra, Saayan., Bursztyn, Victor., Rossi, Ryan., Sarkhel, Somdeb., Zhang, Chao. (Mar. 12, 2024)

ICLR 2024

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