Patrick Amadeus Irawan

About Me

• I am a first-year PhD Student at MBZUAI 🤖, where I focus on multimodal NLP topics, particularly in vision-language interaction. I venture around VLM and UMM alignment, interpretability, and evaluation.

• I am also a Research Engineer at SMU 🇸🇬, working under the supervision of Prof. Chong-Wah Ngo. Our current research work lies at the intersection of multilingual and multimodal interpretation.

• Previously, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in CS from Institut Teknologi Bandung, where I worked under Prof. Ayu Purwarianti on explainable multimodal synthetic data generation. Aside from research, I also do AI Engineering for various use cases. You can see my other experiences here.

Research Interests

At the moment, I often explore the following topics, ordered by the degree of my interest and experience:

1. Multimodal Alignment: Vision-language models (VLMs), unified multimodal models (UMMs), and multimodal alignment through both architectural and non-architectural adaptations (e.g., test-time optimization, data reformulation, prompting, RL, etc.).
2. Multimodal Interpretability: Diagnosis of modality imbalance (bimodal, trimodal, cross-modal), neuron-level intervention, analysis of modality attention distribution, and task-specific gradient reweighting.
3. Domain-specific Multimodal Applications: Large-scale data curation and the development of multilingual and multicultural multimodal benchmarks.

Updates

• [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