Saksham Khatwani
Author directory2026
Surgical Alignment in Knowledge Graph Training for Clinical Diagnosis with Large Language Models
Saksham Khatwani | He Cheng | Majid Afshar | Dmitriy Dligach | Yanjun Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Saksham Khatwani | He Cheng | Majid Afshar | Dmitriy Dligach | Yanjun Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) offer structured medical knowledge that can ground large language model (LLM) reasoning in clinical diagnosis application, yet how KG signal should be integrated into LLMs remains an open question. We present a systematic study spanning five KG task formulations, three training paradigms, two KGs, and three base LLMs. At the task level, all paradigms improve over the non-finetuned baseline, but methods with comparable in-domain accuracy show substantially different knowledge transfer behavior. We introduce Gradient Intervention Density (GID) to measure how broadly an optimizer modifies the pretrained model. GID reveals a clear divide: KG-judgment training under KL regularization produces sparse, localized updates (a regime we term as surgical alignment), while task-specific SFT produces dense ones. A controlled ablation shows that the objective and KL contribute to sparsity independently, and the paradigms that produce sparse updates also improve reasoning quality, even when their in-domain accuracy is lower than task-specific SFT. Assessing KG-LLM integration thus requires complementing accuracy with optimization-geometry diagnostics. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/Surgical-Alignment.
Adding Aspectual Information to Structured Meaning Representations
Claire Benet Post | Paul Bontempo | August Ulfelder Milliken | Alvin Po-Chun Chen | Nicholas Derby | Saksham Khatwani | Sumeyye Nabieva | Karthik Sairam | Alexis Palmer
Proceedings of The Seventh International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (DMR 2026) @ LREC 2026
Claire Benet Post | Paul Bontempo | August Ulfelder Milliken | Alvin Po-Chun Chen | Nicholas Derby | Saksham Khatwani | Sumeyye Nabieva | Karthik Sairam | Alexis Palmer
Proceedings of The Seventh International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations (DMR 2026) @ LREC 2026
To fully capture the meaning of a sentence, semantic representations should encode aspect, which describes the internal temporal structure of events. In graph-based meaning representation frameworks such as Uniform Meaning Representations (UMR), aspect lets one know how events unfold over time, including distinctions such as states, activities, and completed events. Despite its importance, aspect remains sparsely annotated across semantic meaning representation frameworks. This has, in turn, hindered not only current manual annotation, but also the development of automatic systems capable of predicting aspectual information. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset of English sentences annotated with UMR aspect labels over Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs that lack the feature. We describe the annotation scheme and guidelines used to label eventive predicates according to the UMR aspect lattice, as well as the annotation pipeline used to ensure consistency and quality across annotators through a multi-step adjudication process. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset for future automation, we perform simple baseline experiments using three modeling approaches. Our results establish initial benchmarks for automatic UMR aspect prediction and provide a foundation for integrating aspect into semantic meaning representations more broadly.
LogosKG: Hardware-Optimized Scalable and Interpretable Knowledge Graph Retrieval
He Cheng | Yifu Wu | Saksham Khatwani | Maya Kruse | Dmitriy Dligach | Timothy A. Miller | Majid Afshar | Yanjun Gao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
He Cheng | Yifu Wu | Saksham Khatwani | Maya Kruse | Dmitriy Dligach | Timothy A. Miller | Majid Afshar | Yanjun Gao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly integrated with large language models (LLMs) to provide structured, verifiable reasoning. A core operation in this integration is multi-hop retrieval, yet existing systems struggle to balance efficiency, scalability, and interpretability. We introduce LogosKG, a novel, hardware-aligned framework that enables scalable and interpretable k-hop retrieval on large KGs by building on symbolic KG formulations and executing traversal as hardware-efficient operations over decomposed subject, object, and relation representations. To scale to billion-edge graphs, LogosKG integrates degree-aware partitioning, cross-graph routing, and on-demand caching. Experiments show substantial efficiency gains over CPU and GPU baselines without loss of retrieval fidelity. With proven performance in KG retrieval, a downstream two-round KG-LLM interaction demonstrates how LogosKG enables large-scale, evidence-grounded analysis of how KG topology, such as hop distribution and connectivity, shapes the alignment between structured biomedical knowledge and LLM diagnostic reasoning, thereby opening the door for next-generation KG-LLM integration. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/LogosKG, and an online demo is available at https://lark-nlp-lab-logoskg.hf.space/.
Lay-Language and Cross-Lingual Disparities in LLM Medical Diagnosis: A Case Study in Rheumatological Skin Conditions
Grayson Hubbell | Yifei Zhang | Saksham Khatwani | Sriram Sankaranarayanan | Indira Sriram | Maria Leonor Pacheco
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Grayson Hubbell | Yifei Zhang | Saksham Khatwani | Sriram Sankaranarayanan | Indira Sriram | Maria Leonor Pacheco
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Patients increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) for medical self-diagnosis in both English and non-English, often in colloquial language. We evaluate LLM diagnostic performance on rheumatological skin conditions across lay descriptions in English, Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin, collected from native speakers without medical training, and clinical descriptions in English. Lay descriptions substantially reduce diagnostic accuracy relative to clinical ones, and the gap widens further across non-English languages. A diagnostic-focused system prompt narrows the lay-vs-clinical gap but does little to close the cross-language gap. Current LLMs appear to reproduce, and in some settings amplify, communication-driven disparities documented in clinical medicine.
2025
Simple Yet Effective: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Multi-LLM Uncertainty Quantification
Maya Kruse | Majid Afshar | Saksham Khatwani | Anoop Mayampurath | Guanhua Chen | Yanjun Gao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Maya Kruse | Majid Afshar | Saksham Khatwani | Anoop Mayampurath | Guanhua Chen | Yanjun Gao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) often behave inconsistently across inputs, indicating uncertainty and motivating the need for its quantification in high-stakes settings. Prior work on calibration and uncertainty quantification often focuses on individual models, overlooking the potential of model diversity. We hypothesize that LLMs make complementary predictions due to differences in training and the Zipfian nature of language, and that aggregating their outputs leads to more reliable uncertainty estimates. To leverage this, we propose MUSE (Multi-LLM Uncertainty via Subset Ensembles), a simple information-theoretic method that uses Jensen-Shannon Divergence to identify and aggregate well-calibrated subsets of LLMs. Experiments on binary prediction tasks demonstrate improved calibration and predictive performance compared to single-model and naive ensemble baselines. In addition, we explore using MUSE as guided signals with chain-of-thought distillation to fine-tune LLMs for calibration. MUSE is available at: https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/MUSE.