Manan Suri

CS PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park. LLM agents, context, and trust.

Photo of Manan Suri
5108, 8125 Paint Branch Dr College Park, MD 20742

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Dinesh Manocha at the GAMMA Lab, where I am supported by a Dean’s Fellowship from the Department of Computer Science.

I work on making AI agents capable in practice. My research asks how agents should hold and use context — in prompts, in retrieved documents, or baked into parameters — and how we know when to trust what they produce. On the trust side, I build attribution methods that ground agent outputs in charts, flowcharts, and documents, plus principled clarification under uncertainty. On the efficiency side, I develop parametric-memory techniques that distill multimodal context into reusable LoRA adapters. And because agents are only as good as their data, I build the training corpora and benchmarks the field needs.

Since June 2026, I have been a research intern at Meta Superintelligence Labs in Menlo Park, working on parametric memory for agents. In spring 2026, I was a research fellow at NIST through the PREP program, building CyberForge, a verified vulnerability-injection pipeline for training cybersecurity agents. In summer 2025, I was an Applied Science Intern at Amazon on the agentic developer tools team, working on software engineering agents.

Previously, I worked on greenwashing detection as a Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Warwick, collaborating with the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, and contributed to fact attribution and document retrieval systems at Scalenut.

research

Trust and attribution

Making agent outputs verifiable by grounding them in the exact chart elements, flowchart paths, and document regions that support them, and asking the right clarifying question when the request itself is ambiguous.

Efficient context and parametric memory

Distilling long multimodal context (video, audio-visual streams) into reusable LoRA adapters so a frozen model can answer repeated queries with zero context tokens.

Data and benchmarks for agents

Building the training corpora and evaluations agents actually need, from verified vulnerability-injection data for security agents to better problem statements for software agents.

news

Sep 10, 2026 Our paper “CyberForge: Verified Vulnerability Injection at Repository Level for Cybersecurity Agent Training” is on arXiv with a project page, and was featured by UMD Computer Science in “When AI Goes on Defense”.
Jun 3, 2026 Our paper “Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models” is on arXiv, with a project page, code, and checkpoints. It was also featured by UMD Computer Science in “Teaching AI to See Faster”.
Jun 1, 2026 Started as a research intern at Meta Superintelligence Labs in Menlo Park, working on parametric memory for agents.
May 20, 2026 Earned my MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, continuing toward the PhD.
Apr 28, 2026 Received the Outstanding Achievement award for contributions to the UMD CS Graduate Program (2025–2026).

press

  • When AI Goes on Defense — UMD Department of Computer Science, September 2026. On CyberForge: generating verified vulnerability-injection training data for cybersecurity agents.
  • Teaching AI to See Faster — UMD Department of Computer Science, July 2026. On Frames2LoRA: turning a video into a LoRA adapter so a vision-language model can answer with zero visual tokens in context.

talks

  • From Language Models to Agents: Foundations, Frameworks, and Future Challenges — Illinois Institute of Technology, December 2025.
  • Fine-grained Visual Attribution — Adobe, San Jose, August 2025.
  • Detecting Green Messaging and an Exploration into Greenwashing — DataFest 2023, The Shard, London, August 2023.

service

  • Workshop organizer: RARA: Grounding Documents with Reasoning, Agents, Retrieval, and Attribution — ICDM 2025
  • Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review (2024–present), ICLR, AAAI, ICASSP, and other NLP/ML venues

selected publications

2026

  1. Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models
    Manan Suri*, Sarvesh Baskar*, and Dinesh Manocha
    Jun 2026
    * equal contribution. Formerly titled Video2LoRA (arXiv v1).
  2. Omni2LoRA: Coherence-Preserving Parametric Memory for Efficient Omni Language Models
    Puneet MathurManan Suri, and Dinesh Manocha
    Aug 2026
  3. CyberForge: Verified Vulnerability Injection at Repository Level for Cybersecurity Agent Training
    Amine Lbath*, Manan Suri*, Aurélien Delaitre, Vadim Okun, Massih-Reza Amini, Ram D. Sriram, and Dinesh Manocha
    Aug 2026
    * equal contribution
  4. Figure from CodeScout: Contextual Problem Statement Enhancement for Software Agents
    ACL
    CodeScout: Contextual Problem Statement Enhancement for Software Agents
    Manan Suri, Xiangci Li, Mehdi Shojaie, Songyang Han, Chao-Chun Hsu, Shweta Garg, Aniket Anand Deshmukh, and Varun Kumar
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, Jul 2026
  5. Figure from Structured Uncertainty Guided Clarification for LLM Agents
    ACL
    Structured Uncertainty Guided Clarification for LLM Agents
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, Jul 2026

2025

  1. VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
    Manan SuriPuneet MathurFranck Dernoncourt, Kanika Goswami, Ryan A. Rossi, and Dinesh Manocha
    In Proceedings of the 2025 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Apr 2025
  2. Figure from ChartLens: Fine-grained Visual Attribution in Charts
    ACL
    ChartLens: Fine-grained Visual Attribution in Charts
    In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2025
  3. Follow the Flow: Fine-grained Flowchart Attribution with Neurosymbolic Agents
    In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2025

2024

  1. DocEdit-v2: Document Structure Editing Via Multimodal LLM Grounding
    Manan SuriPuneet MathurFranck Dernoncourt, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I Morariu, Ramit Sawhney, Preslav Nakov, and Dinesh Manocha
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2024

2023

  1. Figure from ACLM: A Selective-Denoising based Generative Data Augmentation Approach for Low-Resource Complex NER
    ACL
    ACLM: A Selective-Denoising based Generative Data Augmentation Approach for Low-Resource Complex NER
    Sreyan Ghosh, Utkarsh Tyagi, Manan Suri, Sonal Kumar, Ramaneswaran S, and Dinesh Manocha
    In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Jul 2023
  2. CoSyn: Detecting Implicit Hate Speech in Online Conversations Using a Context Synergized Hyperbolic Network
    Sreyan GhoshManan Suri, Purva Chiniya, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar, and Dinesh Manocha
    In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Dec 2023

mentions