Negar Arabzadeh

Negar Arabzadeh

Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley

This is Negar Arabzadeh. I am a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, working with Professor Matei Zaharia. I completed my PhD at the University of Waterloo, where I was advised by Dr. Charles Clarke. My research lies at the intersection of information retrieval and the evaluation of—and with—large language models (LLMs) in information access systems.

I am on the academic job market starting in 2026.

News

2026

2025

  • 🏅

    Runner-up Best Paper Award at SIGIR-AP 2025 for “Adversarial Attacks against Neural Ranking Models via In-Context Learning.”

  • ✈️

    Attended my first NeurIPS! It was pretty OVERWHELMING.

  • 🎤

    Presented “Restructuring the Corpus Makes RAG Work for Math” at the Math AI workshop, NeurIPS 2025.

  • 🎤

    Presented “DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis” at the LLM Evaluation workshop, NeurIPS 2025.

  • 🎤

    Presented “Towards Automatically Optimizing Retrieval Augmented AI Systems” at the ML for Systems workshop, NeurIPS 2025.

  • 🗺️

    Released MAP: Measuring Agents in Production — a whole-year-long project.

  • 📚

    Can LLMs Uphold Research Integrity? Evaluating the Role of LLMs in Peer Review Quality” accepted at WSDM 2026Best Industry Paper Award.

    with Sajad Ebrahimi, Soroush Sadeghian, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Alireza Daqiq, Hai Son Le, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri.

  • 🏋️‍♀️

    Released “QueryGym: A Toolkit for Reproducible LLM-Based Query Reformulation.”

    with Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Mert Incesu, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri.

  • ✈️

    Attended CIKM in Seoul, South Korea — presented one applied research paper, one short paper, and an industry talk.

  • 🎓

    Graduated with my PhD from the University of Waterloo — thesis nominated for the Gold Thesis Award.

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currently working on

Right now I am working on agentic IR, RAG-related problems, and using retrieval for reasoning-intensive tasks. Reach out if you have ideas to discuss — I am always happy to collaborate.

peer-reviewed papers

Publications

Books, journals, and conference papers from 2018 to today.

previous research positions

Research

Where I have done research and the people I have been lucky to work with.

selected projects

Projects

Selected projects, organized by research topic.

academic community service

Service

Workshops, tutorials, chairing roles, and peer review.

selected talks

Talks

Invited talks, tutorials, and conference presentations.