publications | Ömer Faruk Akgül

Rethinking RL for LLM Reasoning: It’s Sparse Policy Selection, Not Capability Learning

Ömer Faruk Akgül, Rajgopal Kannan, Willie Neiswanger, and 1 more author

arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06241, 2026

@article{akgul2026rethinking,
  title = {Rethinking RL for LLM Reasoning: It's Sparse Policy Selection, Not Capability Learning},
  author = {Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Kannan, Rajgopal and Neiswanger, Willie and Prasanna, Viktor},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06241},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {01},
}

NeurIPS

LYNX: Learning Dynamic Exits for Confidence-Controlled Reasoning

Ömer Faruk Akgül, Yusuf Hakan Kalaycı, Rajgopal Kannan, and 2 more authors

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{akgul2026lynx,
  title = {LYNX: Learning Dynamic Exits for Confidence-Controlled Reasoning},
  author = {Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Kalayc{\i}, Yusuf Hakan and Kannan, Rajgopal and Neiswanger, Willie and Prasanna, Viktor},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {02},
}

COLM

Resa: Transparent Reasoning Models via SAEs

Shangshang Wang, Julian Asilis, Ömer Faruk Akgül, and 4 more authors

In Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{wang2026resa,
  title = {Resa: Transparent Reasoning Models via SAEs},
  author = {Wang, Shangshang and Asilis, Julian and Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Bilgin, Enes Burak and Liu, Ollie and Fu, Deqing and Neiswanger, Willie},
  booktitle = {Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {03},
}

ICLR

Tina: Tiny Reasoning Models via LoRA

Shangshang Wang, Julian Asilis, Ömer Faruk Akgül, and 3 more authors

In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{wang2026tina,
  title = {Tina: Tiny Reasoning Models via LoRA},
  author = {Wang, Shangshang and Asilis, Julian and Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Bilgin, Enes Burak and Liu, Ollie and Neiswanger, Willie},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {04},
}

EACL

RECIPE-TKG: From Sparse History to Structured Reasoning for LLM-based Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Ömer Faruk Akgül, Feiyu Zhu, Yuxin Yang, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2026

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{akgul2026recipe,
  title = {RECIPE-TKG: From Sparse History to Structured Reasoning for LLM-based Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion},
  author = {Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Zhu, Feiyu and Yang, Yuxin and Kannan, Rajgopal and Prasanna, Viktor},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {05},
}

UAI

Conformal Prediction for Federated Graph Neural Networks with Missing Neighbor Information

Ömer Faruk Akgül, Rajgopal Kannan, and Viktor Prasanna

In Proceedings of the 41st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2025

arXiv Bib HTML

@inproceedings{akgul2025conformal,
  title = {Conformal Prediction for Federated Graph Neural Networks with Missing Neighbor Information},
  author = {Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Kannan, Rajgopal and Prasanna, Viktor},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)},
  year = {2025},
  ranking = {06},
}

EMNLP

SPARC-RAG: Adaptive Sequential-Parallel Scaling with Context Management for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Yuxin Yang, Gangda Deng, Ömer Faruk Akgül, and 6 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{yang2026sparcrag,
  title = {SPARC-RAG: Adaptive Sequential-Parallel Scaling with Context Management for Retrieval-Augmented Generation},
  author = {Yang, Yuxin and Deng, Gangda and Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Chitsazan, Nima and Govilkar, Yash and Tigalappanavara, Akasha and Zhang, Shi-Xiong and Sahu, Sambit and Prasanna, Viktor},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {07},
}

Preprint

Schema-Free Text-to-SQL: Learning Enterprise Database Structure from Query Logs

Ömer Faruk Akgül, Nikhil Kapahi, and Prajit Muppidi

Preprint, 2026

Bib

@article{akgul2026schemafree,
  title = {Schema-Free Text-to-SQL: Learning Enterprise Database Structure from Query Logs},
  author = {Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Kapahi, Nikhil and Muppidi, Prajit},
  journal = {Preprint},
  year = {2026},
  ranking = {08},
}

An Efficient Distributed Graph Engine for Deep Learning on Graphs

Gangda Deng, Ömer Faruk Akgül, Hongkuan Zhou, and 4 more authors

In Proceedings of the SC’23 Workshops of The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis, 2023

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{deng2023engine,
  title = {An Efficient Distributed Graph Engine for Deep Learning on Graphs},
  author = {Deng, Gangda and Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Zhou, Hongkuan and Zeng, Hanqing and Xia, Yinglong and Li, Jianbo and Prasanna, Viktor},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the SC'23 Workshops of The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis},
  pages = {922--931},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1145/3624062.3624169},
  ranking = {09},
}

arXiv

Training Diverse Graph Experts for Ensembles: A Systematic Empirical Study

Gangda Deng, Yuxin Yang, Ömer Faruk Akgül, and 4 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.18370, 2025

arXiv Bib Code

@article{deng2025diverse,
  title = {Training Diverse Graph Experts for Ensembles: A Systematic Empirical Study},
  author = {Deng, Gangda and Yang, Yuxin and Akg{\"u}l, {\"O}mer Faruk and Zeng, Hanqing and Xia, Yinglong and Kannan, Rajgopal and Prasanna, Viktor},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.18370},
  year = {2025},
  ranking = {10},
}