USC and Capital One announce 2026–2027 AI research awards

Advancing responsible AI through multi-sector academic collaboration

Capital One selected the 2026–2027 CREDIF Research Award Recipients for joint academic collaborations with the University of Southern California (USC). Established through the Center for Responsible AI and Decision Making in Finance (CREDIF) at USC, these collaborations pair academic faculty with Capital One research scientists to address foundational challenges in machine learning and financial AI systems.

Along with these award recipients, two faculty members were chosen to receive our inaugural CREDIF Capital One Faculty Fellowship Award. Granted as a two-year gift to professors spearheading pioneering AI research, these fellowships provide direct support for ongoing research efforts while enabling recipients and their graduate students to actively collaborate with Capital One scientists.

The 2026–2027 awarded research collaborations and principal investigators include:

Uncertainty quantification for multi-agent LLM systems: Decomposition and failure localization

• Faculty Lead: Prof. Salman Avestimehr
• PhD Fellow: Asal Mehradfar
• Focus: Developing robust frameworks to quantify uncertainty, decompose complex agent workflows and localize failure modes in multi-agent large language model environments.

Dynamic schema-guided Monte Carlo for text-to-SQL agents on massive databases

• Faculty Lead: Prof. Paul Bogdan
• PhD Fellow: Kien Nguyen
• Focus: Advancing natural language interfaces for database querying by pairing dynamic schema representation with Monte Carlo search techniques.

FinSemKG: A semantic mediation layer for grounded, auditable LLM question answering over financial tables

• Faculty Lead: Prof. Craig Knoblock
• PhD Fellow: Md Abrar Jahin
• Focus: Constructing semantic knowledge graph structures that ensure grounded, explainable and auditable question-answering pipelines for tabular financial data.

XFinAgent: Financial analyst agents with sparse-probe control, multi-agent explainability and robust evaluation

• Faculty Lead: Prof. Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
• PhD Fellow: Mohammad Shahab Sepehri
• Focus: Creating autonomous financial analyst agents equipped with sparse-probe mechanistic control, transparent multi-agent interactions and rigorous evaluation benchmarks.

Query-adaptive graph traversal and persistent investigation memory for financial knowledge extraction

• Faculty Lead: Prof. Viktor Prasanna
• PhD Fellow: Yuxin Yang
• Focus: Designing adaptive graph neural algorithms and persistent memory representations to execute complex knowledge extraction over relational network data.

CREDIF: Multi-signal reward modeling for robust and trustworthy AI

• Faculty Lead: Prof. Swabha Swayamdipta
• PhD Fellow: Xinyue Cui
• Focus: Formulating multi-signal reward mechanisms to align foundation models with complex safety, trustworthiness and operational constraints.

The 2026–2027 CREDIF Faculty Fellowship Award Recipients are:

Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
Research Proposal: Belief-Weaver: Probabilistic Belief Transformers for Synergizing Language, Knowledge and Rich Feedback
PhD Fellow: Zarif Ikram

Paria Rashidinejad
Research Proposal: Unlocking Diverse Thinking and Planning in AI Agents
PhD Fellow: Amin Banayeeanzade

Bridging academic discovery and real-world application

Multisector partnerships give academic researchers direct insight into practical industry challenges while giving Capital One scientists access to cutting-edge theoretical techniques. Each awarded project pairs USC principal investigators directly with Capital One research collaborators to co-develop methodologies, produce open scientific publications and contribute code to the scientific community.

Building long-term research opportunities

Awarded projects run through the 2026–2027 academic year. Results feed directly into peer-reviewed research papers targeted at academic conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR and ICML. These initiatives also create career pathways for graduate students through internship programs and professional research roles at Capital One.

Congratulations to the CREDIF 2026–2027 awardees! We look forward to a year of discovery and breakthrough innovation born from these multisector collaborations.