Derry Wijaya

Monash University Indonesia | Boston University (Adjunct) | Jakarta, Indonesia | Derry.Wijaya@monash.edu

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I am an Associate Professor and the Program Coordinator for the Data Science Program at Monash University Indonesia. I also serve as the co-director of the Monash Data and Democracy Research Hub, an interdisciplinary lab focused on analyzing and researching the impact of data and technology on democracy in the digital age.

My current research advances multilingual, multimodal, and multicultural Natural Language Processing. I work on the interpretability and steerability of language models—including mechanistic interpretability, safe model editing, and hallucination reduction—as well as evaluation frameworks that better align with human preferences (meta-metrics and LLM-as-a-judge). In parallel, I build culturally grounded resources and benchmarks for low-resource languages, covering indigenous scripts, honorifics, and code-switching. I am also deeply engaged in analyzing framing, bias, toxicity, and misinformation within AI models and public communications.

Before moving back home and joining Monash, I was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Boston University. I am a Fulbrighter, I earned my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, where I was advised by Tom Mitchell. Following that, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of Chris Callison-Burch. I hold both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Computing from the National University of Singapore, where I worked with Stephane Bressan as my advisor.

I serve as a program committee, area chair, senior area chair, session and local organizer chair for various machine learning and natural language processing conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, IJCNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, and journals.

Prospective students and collaborators: I am looking for motivated PhD students and research assistants to work on multilingual and multicultural NLP, language-model interpretability and evaluation, knowledge graph and neurosymbolic AI, and NLP for society. I also welcome Master’s students, though please note that our Master of Data Science is coursework-based (we do not currently offer a Master by Research), so Master’s applicants will need to secure their own funding or scholarship to enroll. If you are interested, please email me at Derry.Wijaya@monash.edu with your CV and a brief note on which of my papers or projects resonate with you.

news

Jun 01, 2026 Three new papers accepted in 2026: entity tracking in language models (ICML), multilingual rubric-agnostic reward reasoning (ICLR), and AI misconceptions among Indonesian K-12 teachers (AIED). :tada:
Mar 25, 2026 I am honored to be featured in Monash University Indonesia’s Teachers that Transform campaign. :star:
Dec 09, 2025 I organized the Monash Women in AI panel to discuss careers and research in artificial intelligence.
Sep 23, 2025 The Data and Democracy Dialogue 2025 brought together researchers, policymakers, and civil society to examine digital transformation and democratic governance in ASEAN.
Sep 08, 2025 Our Master of Data Science students and researchers traveled to Vienna to present at ACL 2025, the world’s leading NLP conference. Read the Monash feature. :airplane:

selected publications

2026

  1. ICML
    Do Language Models Track Entities Across State Changes?
    Zilu Tang, Qianou Zhao, Giulia Franco, and 4 more authors
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
    URL
  2. ICLR
    mR3: Multilingual Rubric-Agnostic Reward Reasoning Models
    David Anugraha, Shou-Yi Hung, Zilu Tang, and 3 more authors
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
    URL
  3. pre-print
    Beyond Transfer Accuracy: Faithful Circuits for Controlled Low-Resource Adaptation
    Khumaisa Nur’aini, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08146, 2026
    URL

2025

  1. EMNLP
    What Do Indonesians Really Need from Language Technology? A Nationwide Survey
    Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Lucky Susanto, Derry Wijaya, and 1 more author
    In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025
    URL
  2. ACL
    Do Language Models Understand Honorific Systems in Javanese?
    Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Iwan Darmawan, Adryan Kusumawardhana, and 3 more authors
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
    URL
  3. ACL
    NusaAksara: A Multimodal and Multilingual Benchmark for Preserving Indonesian Indigenous Scripts
    Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Mukti Wijanarko, Lucky Susanto, and 3 more authors
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
    URL

2024

  1. ACL-findings
    Deductive closure training of language models for coherence, accuracy, and updatability
    Afra Feyza Akyürek, Ekin Akyürek, Leshem Choshen, and 2 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.08574, 2024
    DOI URL
  2. pre-print
    Metametrics: Calibrating metrics for generation tasks using human preferences
    Genta Indra Winata, David Anugraha, Lucky Susanto, and 2 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02381, 2024
    DOI URL
  3. pre-print
    WORLDCUISINES: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines
    Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, and 8 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.12705, 2024
    DOI URL

2023

  1. ACL
    Rl4f: Generating natural language feedback with reinforcement learning for repairing model outputs
    Afra Feyza Akyürek, Ekin Akyürek, Aman Madaan, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.08844, 2023
    DOI URL
  2. EMNLP
    Dune: Dataset for unified editing
    Afra Feyza Akyürek, Eric Pan, Garry Kuwanto, and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.16087, 2023
    DOI URL