Short Bio
Dr. Avi Sil is a Senior Director of Applied Science at Oracle. His teams work on various technologies on Agentic workflows for Deep Research, agentic NL2SQL, alignment of reasoning LLMs via reinforcement learning and inference scaling with LLMs. Previously, he spent over a decade at IBM Research (New York) as a people manager, leading strategy for Agentic workflows and their integration into products like code assistants and AI agentic middleware. He has pioneered several initiatives at IBM, including rebuilding the company's leadership in Question Answering and spearheading the development of Agent 101, IBM Research's first AI agent, which topped the SWE-Bench leaderboard.
With over a decade of experience, Avi is internationally recognized for his contributions to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Agentic Workflows involving large language models. His research also covers inference-scaling algorithms, uncertainty in LLMs, reinforcement learning-based verifiers, and natural language to code (Spec2Generation).
Avi has also held dual positions at Stanford University as a Visiting Research Scholar since 2021 till 2025 as part of the IBM-Stanford collaboration. He has been the main point of contact for the IBM Stanford HAI affliation (with Chris Potts, Matei Zaharia and Omar Khattab) and also for the recent SEAMS collaboration (with Azalia Mirhoseini, Percy Liang and others). In the past he has collaborated with CMU (Graham Neubig), Stony Brook (Niranjan Balasubramanian), UMass (Mohit Iyyer), UIUC NLP (Heng Ji) and University of Washington (Hanna Hajishirzi).
He actively contributes to the NLP community, serving in senior roles (SAC, track chair) at major conferences like ACL and NAACL, and holds over 20 U.S. patents in AI technologies.
Research Interests
- Agentic Workflows with reasoning LLMs
- Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Embedding models and Retrieval technologies
- Entity Linking, Information Extraction
- Applied Machine Learning Systems
Selected Publications
See full list on Google Scholar.
- Self-RAG: Learning to retrieve, generate, and critique through self-reflection - ICLR 2024 - PDF
- PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering - ACL 2023 — GitHub
- One for All: Towards Language Independent Named Entity Linking — AAAI 2018 — PDF
- Liberal Event Extraction and Event Schema Induction — ACL 2016 - PDF
Experience
- Oracle — Senior Director, Applied Science. August 2025 - Present.
- IBM Research — Manager + Principal Research Scientist. May 2014 - August 2025