Web-agent distillation
Teaching Agents in their Own Style: Blackbox Teacher Distillation for Web Agents
WebKD trains smaller web agents with black-box teacher feedback that corrects failed trajectories in the student's own style.
Farhan Ishmam
PhD student
University of Utah
Hi, I'm Farhan, a PhD student at Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah (KSoC, UofU) and the AI Lead Researcher at Yaana Communications Lab (YCL). I obtained my Bachelor's degree from IUT-CSE. Currently, I am working with Prof. Kenneth Marino to build AI agents that help people.
Selected research
Projects & resourcesWeb-agent adaptation
Don't Retrain, Remix: Adaptation of Web Agents using Mixture Hypernetworks
WebMix combines learned LoRA adapters using a mixture hypernetwork, helping web agents adapt to unseen domains and changed interfaces without retraining.
Web agents
TimeWarp: Evaluating Web Agents by Revisiting the Past
A benchmark for evaluating web agents on temporal variations of web interfaces, with methods for collecting trajectories and behavior cloning using planning, memory, and reasoning.
News and Updates
- TimeWarp is headed to NeurIPS'26!
- FrugalPrompt is in LUHME at EMNLP'26!
- KNOWS will appear in Findings of EMNLP'26!
- Check out our new preprint, Dora Explorer, on making LLM agents explore better.
- BanHate is in ACL'26!
- Check out TimeWarp, a web agent benchmark on changing websites.
- Our visual survey of computer use agents is now live on the ICLR'26 Blogposts.
- Robustness to Transliteration won the best paper award at BLP at IJCNLP-AACL'25!
- Three papers at WACV'26, on few-shot VLM adapters, corruption robustness, and cultural VQA!
- FrugalPrompt is out!
- Started my PhD at the University of Utah!
- ChitroJera, a regionally relevant VQA dataset for Bangla, is headed to ECML-PKDD'25!
- Attended WACV'25.
- BanTH to appear in Findings of NAACL'25!
- Visual Robustness Benchmark for VQA will appear at WACV'25. I'm grateful to my wonderful teammates and advisors at IUT-CSE.
- FourierKAN outperforms MLP on Text Classification Head Fine-tuning will be presented at FITML at NeurIPS'24. Shoutout to my teammate Abdullah Al Imran.
- Our work on Bangla back-transliteration, BanglaTLit, is in Findings of EMNLP'24. Great work from team Penta!
- New preprint on my undergrad thesis, Visual Robustness Benchmark for VQA, is available on arXiv.
- Finalists at Robi Datathon 3.0, Bangladesh's largest data analysis event with 3,500+ participants. Another competition with team Penta!
- Participated in the EXIST-2024 shared task with my amazing team from Penta Global.
- Our VQA Survey is out in Information Fusion.
Research Map
Explore the connections between my projects. Select a node for details, or browse all research.