Himanshu Kumar
Author directory2026
UCVE: Graph Structured Retrieval for Compliance Validation
Emily Chen | Michelle Menachery | Rahul Nenavath | Himanshu Kumar | Amirfarrokh Iranitalab
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2026
Emily Chen | Michelle Menachery | Rahul Nenavath | Himanshu Kumar | Amirfarrokh Iranitalab
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2026
Structured compliance validation requires determining whether every obligation in a predefined requirement space is satisfied, violated, or unaddressed by a given document. This can be described as a coverage problem that existing retrieval and classification systems, by treating requirements as independent, are not designed to solve. We introduce UCVE, a domain-agnostic framework that represents compliance requirement spaces as a CRG and performs retrieval via spectral reranking over its reinforcement learning-weighted Laplacian. Edges between requirement nodes are learned via reinforcement learning with a traversal reward grounded in violation detection, reshaping the graph’s community structure such that low-pass spectral filtering distinguishes relevant from irrelevant obligation clusters. Evaluating across three compliance domains, UCVE averages 4.3% matched-K recall lift over flat cosine retrieval and consistently outperforms strong retrieval and graph-based baselines.
FinRT: Distilling Adaptive Red-Teaming Strategies into Reusable Adversarial Generators in Consumer Finance
Rikhiya Ghosh | Himanshu Kumar | Sriram Venkatapathy | Sahil Wadhwa | Alexandre G.R. Day | Pranab Mohanty
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Rikhiya Ghosh | Himanshu Kumar | Sriram Venkatapathy | Sahil Wadhwa | Alexandre G.R. Day | Pranab Mohanty
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
In regulated industries like consumer finance, seemingly harmless user queries can exploit large language model vulnerabilities, triggering safety failures and pushing responses dangerously close to policy limits. Existing automated red-teaming methods trade off attack effectiveness against generation cost, while treating coverage, severity, and diversity as incidental rather than joint objectives. We introduce FinRT, a structured framework that builds reusable adversarial prompt generators from adaptive red-teaming strategies. Across the six victim models in consumer finance, FinRT substantially outperforms adaptive search baselines while amortizing target-facing attack generation into a reusable generator. FinRT nearly doubles the attack success rate over the adaptive baseline Rainbow Teaming (Samvelyan et al., 2024) (32.9% vs. 17.2%), increases maximum adversarial severity by 33%, and preserves comparable intra-policy–domain semantic diversity to iterative search methods. Our method achieves high cross-model transferability while exhibiting distinct victim-family specialization patterns.
ART: Adaptive Reasoning Trees for Explainable Claim Verification
Sahil Wadhwa | Himanshu Kumar | Guanqun Yang | Abbaas Alif Mohamed Nishar | Pranab Mohanty | Swapnil Shinde | Yue Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Sahil Wadhwa | Himanshu Kumar | Guanqun Yang | Abbaas Alif Mohamed Nishar | Pranab Mohanty | Swapnil Shinde | Yue Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful candidates for complex decision-making, leveraging vast encoded knowledge and remarkable zero-shot abilities. However, their adoption in high-stakes environments is hindered by their opacity; their outputs lack faithful explanations and cannot be effectively contested to correct errors, undermining trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose ART (Adaptive Reasoning Trees), a hierarchical method for claim verification. The process begins with a root claim, which branches into supporting and attacking child arguments. An argument’s strength is determined bottom-up via a pairwise tournament of its children, adjudicated by a judge LLM, allowing a final, transparent and contestable verdict to be systematically derived which is missing in methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We empirically validate ART on multiple datasets, analyzing different argument generators and comparison strategies. Our findings show that ART’s structured reasoning outperforms strong baselines, establishing a new benchmark for explainable claim verification which is more reliable and ensures clarity in the overall decision making step.
Beyond the Vacuum: Combinatorial Strategy Selection for Competitor-Aware Generative Engine Optimization
Vaibhav Sourirajan | Yao Zhang | Himanshu Kumar | Sahil Wadhwa | Mann Patel | Amirfarrokh Iranitalab
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Vaibhav Sourirajan | Yao Zhang | Himanshu Kumar | Sahil Wadhwa | Mann Patel | Amirfarrokh Iranitalab
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has emerged as a novel paradigm for transforming content to increase visibility in Large Language Model (LLM) responses. Traditional GEO methods, however, select rewriting strategies in isolation, ignoring a critical externality: as adoption of content optimization grows, optimal strategies for rewriting content change. We formalize GEO as a *competitor-aware* strategy selection problem and propose a two-phase pipeline to solve it: (1) We use Bayesian Optimization of Combinatorial Structures (BOCS) to efficiently search the space of rewriting strategies, (2) We generate preference pairs and grounded reasoning traces from the BOCS black-box observations to fine-tune a language model to analyze a document corpus and propose optimal rewriting strategy combinations. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across several impression metrics over existing agentic and single-heuristic methods on both geo-bench and our synthetically augmented competitive dataset geo-benchcomp. Our method also transfers to multiple out-of-distribution datasets, proving effective across domains, queries, and document types.
2025
GRAID: Synthetic Data Generation with Geometric Constraints and Multi-Agentic Reflection for Harmful Content Detection
Melissa Kazemi Rad | Alberto Purpura | Himanshu Kumar | Emily Chen | Mohammad Shahed Sorower
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Melissa Kazemi Rad | Alberto Purpura | Himanshu Kumar | Emily Chen | Mohammad Shahed Sorower
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We address the problem of data scarcity in harmful text classification for guardrailing applications and introduce GRAID (Geometric and Reflective AI-Driven Data Augmentation), a novel pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for dataset augmentation. GRAID consists of two stages: (i) generation of geometrically controlled examples using a constrained LLM, and (ii) augmentation through a multi-agentic reflective process that promotes stylistic diversity and uncovers edge cases. This combination enables both reliable coverage of the input space and nuanced exploration of harmful content. Using two benchmark data sets, we demonstrate that augmenting a harmful text classification dataset with GRAID leads to significant improvements in downstream guardrail model performance.