Spandana Gella

Research Lead

Agentic Harness & Defenses

Spandana Gella is a Research Lead and Sr. Manager for Agentic Defenses and Harnesses at ServiceNow AI Research and is also an Adjunct Faculty member at the School of Computer Science, McGill University. Her research focuses on building robust and safe AI agents spanning agentic harnesses, defenses against adversarial and unsafe behaviour, reliable agent evaluation, and multi-agent security and privacy. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she was advised by Prof. Mirella Lapata and Prof. Frank Keller. Prior to joining ServiceNow, she worked at Amazon AI and AGI labs for six years. She has also worked as a visiting researcher at Meta AI Research and Microsoft Research Redmond and India. She is an active member of the academic community, serving as a core program committee member of EMNLP 2026. She has organised workshops, and served as Area Chair and Program Committee member at major NLP/ML conferences.

Interests

Multimodal Models
Safety
Large Language Models
Dialog

Publications

WebArena-Pro: A Heterogeneous, Multimodal, Reproducible Benchmark for Web Agents. Imene Kerboua, Fatemeh Pesaran, Xing Han Lu, Weijian Qi, Alexander Miller, Junyi Song, Yunjia Tian, Dongjin Kang, Seyeon Choi, Marzia Nouri, Ewen Gueguen, Matteo Boglioni, Fengyuan Liu, Zeyi Liao, Mengqi Yuan, Yue Li, Alexandre Lacoste, Alexandre Drouin, Spandana Gella, Huan Sun, Gunhee Kim, Siva Reddy. At Workshop at the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.

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Augmenting LLM Reasoning with Dynamic Notes Writing for Complex QA. Rishabh Maheshwary, Masoud Hashemi, Khyati Mahajan, Shiva Krishna Reddy Malay, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba, Sathwik Madhusudhan, Spandana Gella, Vikas Yadav. At Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2026.

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CUA-Suite: Expert Trajectories and Pixel-Precise Grounding for Computer-use Agents . Xiangru Jian, Shravan Nayak, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Aarash Feizi, Kaixin Li, Patrice Béchard, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Workshop at the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.

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DRBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Enterprise Deep Research. Amirhossein Abaskohi, Tianyi Chen, Miguel Muñoz-Mármol, Curtis Fox, Amrutha Ramesh, Étienne Marcotte, Xing Han Lu, Nicolas Chapados, Spandana Gella, Christopher Pal, Alexandre Drouin, Issam H. Laradji. At International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

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Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations. Aarash Feizi, Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Kaixin Li, Rabiul Awal, Xing Han Lu, Johan Obando, Juan A. Rodriguez, Nicolas Chapados, David Vazquez, Adriana Romero Soriano, Reihaneh Rabbany, Perouz Taslakian, Christopher Pal, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

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StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images. Patrice Béchard, Chao Wang, Juan A. Rodriguez, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Christopher Pal, David Vazquez, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba, Perouz Taslakian. At European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2026.

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AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Document Understanding. Ahmed Masry, Juan A. Rodriguez, Tianyu Zhang, Suyuchen Wang, Chao Wang, Aarash Feizi, Akshay Kalkunte, Abhay Puri, Xiangru Jian, Pierre-André Noël, Sathwik Madhusudhan, Marco Pedersoli, Bang Liu, Nicolas Chapados, Yoshua Bengio, Enamul Hoque Prince , Christopher Pal, Issam H. Laradji, David Vazquez, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.

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Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Vector Graphics Generation. Juan A. Rodriguez, Haotian Zhang, Abhay Puri, Rishav Pramanik, Aarash Feizi, Pascal Wichmann, Arnab Mondal, Mohammad Reza Samsami, Rabiul Awal, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba, David Vazquez, Christopher Pal, Marco Pedersoli. At Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.

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ColMate: Contrastive Late Interaction and Masked Text for Multimodal Document Retrieval. Ahmed Masry, Megh Thakkar, Patrice Béchard, Sathwik Madhusudhan, Rabiul Awal, Shambhavi Mishra, Akshay Kalkunte, Enamul Hoque Prince , Spandana Gella, Torsten Scholak, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.

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FM2DS: Few-Shot Multimodal Multihop Data Synthesis with Knowledge Distillation for Question Answering. Amirhossein Abaskohi, Spandana Gella, Giuseppe Carenini, Issam H. Laradji. At Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.

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WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation. Rabiul Awal, Mahsa Massoud, Zichao Li, Aarash Feizi, Suyuchen Wang, Christopher Pal, Aishwarya Agrawal, David Vazquez, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.

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BigCharts-R1: Enhanced Chart Reasoning with Visual Reinforcement Finetuning. Ahmed Masry, Abhay Puri, Masoud Hashemi, Juan A. Rodriguez, Megh Thakkar, Khyati Mahajan, Vikas Yadav, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Alexandre Piche, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Christopher Pal, David Vazquez, Enamul Hoque Prince , Perouz Taslakian, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba, Spandana Gella. At Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2025.

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AgentAda: Skill-Adaptive Data Analytics for Tailored Insight Discovery. Amirhossein Abaskohi, Amrutha Ramesh, Shailesh Nanisetty, Chirag Goel, David Vazquez, Christopher Pal, Spandana Gella, Giuseppe Carenini, Issam H. Laradji. At Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.

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SafeArena: Evaluating the Safety of Autonomous Web Agents. Ada Tur, Nicholas Meade, Xing Han Lu, Alejandra Zambrano, Arkil Patel, Esin Durmus, Spandana Gella, Karolina Stanczak, Siva Reddy. At International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.

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UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction. Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian, Kevin Lin, Juan A. Rodriguez, Motek Kalsi, Nicolas Chapados, Tamer Özsu, Aishwarya Agrawal, David Vazquez, Christopher Pal, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.

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AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Understanding. Ahmed Masry, Juan A. Rodriguez, Tianyu Zhang, Suyuchen Wang, Chao Wang, Aarash Feizi, Akshay Kalkunte, Abhay Puri, Xiangru Jian, Pierre-André Noël, Sathwik Madhusudhan, Marco Pedersoli, Bang Liu, Nicolas Chapados, Yoshua Bengio, Enamul Hoque Prince , Christopher Pal, Issam H. Laradji, David Vazquez, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Workshop at the International Conference of Learning Representation (ICLR), 2025.

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WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation. Rabiul Awal, Mahsa Massoud, Zichao Li, Aarash Feizi, Suyuchen Wang, Christopher Pal, Aishwarya Agrawal, David Vazquez, Siva Reddy, Juan A. Rodriguez, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Workshop at the International Conference of Learning Representation (ICLR), 2025.

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BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks. Juan A. Rodriguez, Xiangru Jian, Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Tianyu Zhang, Aarash Feizi, Abhay Puri, Akshay Kalkunte, Francois Savard, Ahmed Masry, Shravan Nayak, Rabiul Awal, Mahsa Massoud, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Zichao Li, Suyuchen Wang, Pierre-André Noël, Mats L. Richter, Saverio Vadacchino, Shubham Agarwal, Sanket Biswas, Sara Shanian, Ying Zhang, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, João Monteiro, Krishnamurthy (Dj) Dvijotham, Torsten Scholak, Nicolas Chapados, Sepideh Kharaghani, Sean Hughes, Tamer Özsu, Siva Reddy, Marco Pedersoli, Yoshua Bengio, Christopher Pal, Issam H. Laradji, Spandana Gella, Perouz Taslakian, David Vazquez, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.

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BigDocs: A Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Vision-Language Models on Document and Code Tasks. Juan A. Rodriguez, Xiangru Jian, Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Tianyu Zhang, Aarash Feizi, Abhay Puri, Akshay Kalkunte, Francois Savard, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Ahmed Masry, Shravan Nayak, Mahsa Massoud, Rabiul Awal, Pierre-André Noël, Mats L. Richter, Saverio Vadacchino, Shubham Agarwal, Sanket Biswas, Ying Zhang, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, João Monteiro, Krishnamurthy (Dj) Dvijotham, Torsten Scholak, Nicolas Chapados, Sean Hughes, Tamer Özsu, Aishwarya Agrawal, Marco Pedersoli, Christopher Pal, Perouz Taslakian, David Vazquez, Issam H. Laradji, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba. At Workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

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FM2DS: Few-Shot Multimodal Multihop Data Synthesis with Knowledge Distillation for Question Answering. Issam H. Laradji, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Giuseppe Carenini, Spandana Gella. At ArXiv, 2024.

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