Patrick Amadeus Irawan

About Me

• I am a PhD student at MBZUAI 🤖, where I focus on multimodal NLP topics, particularly vision-language interaction. I also work on vision-language alignment, unified (any) multimodal models, and large-scale evaluations. I am advised by Alham Fikri Aji and Yova Kementchedjhieva.

• Previously, I was a Research Engineer at SMU 🇸🇬 working at the intersection of multilingual and multimodal interpretation under Chong-Wah Ngo. Before that, I earned my bachelor’s degree in CS from Institut Teknologi Bandung, where I worked under Ayu Purwarianti on explainable multimodal synthetic data generation.

• In addition to research, I also do AI engineering for various use cases. You can see my other experiences here.

• Further, I plan to specialize my studies in developing methods to better align different modalities, with the goal of mitigating modality imbalance, especially in the avenue of unified multimodal models.

Research Interests

During my studies and prior experience, I have often worked on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

1. Multimodal Imbalance: I believe that imbalanced learning is a significant bottleneck that prevents us from obtaining reliable multimodal models, as modality shortcuts and biases can harm both performance and the objectivity of evaluation. My work focuses on discovering its root causes and exploring methods to better align models to prevent such issues.
2. LLM/VLM Alignment: I also work on both architectural and non-architectural adaptations (knowledge enrichment, data reformulation, RL) to address above issues and/or improve multimodal language modeling in general.
3. Large-Scale Evaluations: I often question model robustness in scenarios with varying resource levels; however, probing this requires designing both broad and specific evaluation coverage. My work in this area aims to design benchmarks that assess the inclusivity of multimodal models, specifically by addressing concept underrepresentation through targeted data curation in multilingual and multicultural domains.

Updates

• [Nov. 2025] Our study exposing the confusion of VLMs in cultural-conflict visual scenario is up on arXiv!
• [Dec. 2025] M4-RAG is out on arXiv! We present an evaluation of how multimodal knowledge enrichment helps model in tackling multilingual query. Spoiler, it does not always help… 🤯
• [Oct. 2025] Entropy2Vec got accepted into MRL Workshop @ EMNLP 2025 🌐🇨🇳!
• [July 2025] Seeing Culture Benchmark is accepted to EMNLP 2025 🇨🇳! On to the next one with SMU Multimedia team 💪
• [May. 2025] DataRubrics is now on arXiv! We propose a unified scorecard to evaluate data quality on multi-faceted metrics.
• [Apr. 2025] WorldCuisines receives Best Theme Paper award at NAACL 2025! 🎉🌏🍽️
• [Mar. 2025] Admitted to the Fall 2025 cohort of the MBZUAI PhD program in NLP! 📚
• [Jan. 2025] WorldCuisines and ProxyLM are accepted to NAACL 2025 🇺🇸 🎖️
• [Nov. 2024] My first first-author paper, a VL synthetic data generation framework, is accepted to COLING 2025 🎉
• [Oct. 2024] WorldCuisines, the largest multicultural VL food benchmark, is released. Honored to co-lead the project 🥘
• [Sep. 2024] SEACrowd is accepted to EMNLP 2024! 🇺🇸

Publications

Misc.

Experience

• Research Engineer @ Singapore Management University (2025 - Now)
• Research Engineer Intern @ ai&you (2024 -2024)
• Data Scientist Intern @ Supertype (2023 - 2023)
• Software Engineer Intern @ Blibli (2022 - 2022)
• Software Engineer Intern @ Ruangguru (2022 - 2022)

Conference Reviewers

• ACL Rolling Review (ARR) 2025
• Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC) 2025