Ronak Pradeep

Ronak Pradeep

Research Scientist at Databricks AI Research

PhD, University of Waterloo. Apple PhD Fellow.

Hi! I am a Research Scientist at Databricks AI Research working on synthetic data and reinforcement learning for post-training information-seeking agents. I completed my PhD in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where I was advised by Jimmy Lin. I have also had the chance to work at Google, Apple, and Yupp AI.

Previously, I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo, where I majored in Computer Science and Combinatorics and Optimization. During my undergrad, I've had the chance to intern at Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila), ContextLogic, and RBC Research.

EmailCVScholar

Research Interests

I work on knowledge agents: systems that search, read, and reason over large collections of structured and unstructured data to answer hard questions. I approach this from both the data side and the model side, through data environments and reinforcement learning. I have also worked extensively on evaluation, including nugget-based assessment of RAG, LLM judges, and community-wide benchmarks such as the TREC RAG Track. These threads are connected, because better evaluation leads directly to better rewards.

Latest Updates

  1. Life update: I joined Databricks AI Research!

  2. Two papers accepted at SIGIR 2026: Auto-Judge, a benchmark for LLM judges in citation-grounded RAG, and automating long-form query generation!

  3. The overview of the TREC 2025 RAG Track is out! We are running the track again in 2026.

  4. We have five papers accepted at SIGIR 2025! See you all in Padova!

  5. We had a successful first year of the TREC RAG 2024 Track with many submissions! Looking forward to Y2.

  6. Organizing the TREC RAG 2024 Track! Do submit your systems :))

  7. We introduced RankZephyr which garnered great community engagement!

  8. I'm excited to visit Singapore for EMNLP 2023 to present our work "How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?"

  9. I will be leading the TREC 2024 Retrieval-Augmented Generation Track! More information coming soon!

  10. We introduced RankVicuna, the first zero-shot listwise reranker that leverages open-source LLMs!

Publications

Topics
Year
Venue

50 papers

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

... and a few more papers I might have potentially missed! See my Google Scholar for the complete list.

Mentorship

During my PhD journey, I had the privilege of mentoring over 40 undergraduate and graduate students! Below are some of the amazing students I've had the honor to work with (ordered lexicographically by last name):

  • Vikram Chandramohan
  • Haonan (Arthur) Chen
  • Steven Chen
  • Yidi Chen
  • Hang Cui
  • Lily Ge
  • Lingwei Gu
  • Qing Guo
  • Zibo (Daniel) Guo
  • Nikhil Gupta
  • Xiao (Johnson) Han
  • Nour Jedidi
  • Yuxuan Ji
  • Faraz Khoubsirat
  • Nathan Kuissi
  • Sisi Li
  • Yilin (Larry) Li
  • Estella Liu
  • Yuqi Liu
  • Xueguang Ma
  • Jie (Stefan) Min
  • Ryan Nguyen
  • Pouya Sadeghi
  • Nima Sadri
  • Andre Slavescu
  • Yuvan Sooryakumar
  • Kai Sun
  • Manveer Singh Tamber
  • Raghav Vasudeva
  • Yuetong Wang
  • Alvis Wong
  • Jasper Xian
  • Andrew Xu
  • Edward Xu
  • Ruizhou (Richard) Xu
  • Yicheng (Kevin) Xu
  • Jeongseop (Patrick) Yi
  • Edwin Zhang
  • Eric Zhang
  • Lijia (Lizzy) Zhang
  • Brayden Zhong
  • Vincent Zhong
  • Catherine Zhou
  • Joe Zou

Playlists

Thanks for making it to here :-) As a token of gratitude and since you asked nicely for it, I shall also introduce you to a few of my Spotify playlists.

ॐ

And everything under the sun is in tune. But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

A music dump of sorts. Updated regularly.

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A Day In The Life

An allusion to the Beatles song. Curated by a younger me for someone who stole my heart.

Not updated anymore.

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Liebesträume

And what exactly is a dream of love? Here I take on Liszt and attempt to provide a longer answer to aid with my sleep.

Updated semi-regularly.

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