Umakanta Maharana

PhD Scholar in Computer Vision @ NIT Rourkela

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Ph.D. Scholar (Computer Vision)

NIT Rourkela, Odisha

526cs6003@nitrkl.ac.in

Ph.D. Scholar @ NIT Rourkela • ANRF PAIR Project

Hi! I am Umakanta Maharana, a doctoral researcher pursuing my Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela, specializing in Computer Vision and Deep Learning.

My doctoral research investigates Cattle Behaviour Recognition under the prestigious ANRF PAIR (Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research) project. Under this flagship national initiative—where NIT Rourkela serves as a national hub institution—my research focuses on designing deep spatio-temporal video architectures, action recognition models, and vision-based precision livestock monitoring systems for automated animal welfare, activity tracking, and health diagnostics.

Prior to starting my Ph.D., I was a Research Fellow at the RespAI Lab, where I worked on Role-Based Access Control in LLMs (including our OrgAccess benchmark, accepted at EMNLP 2025), healthcare AI diagnostic reasoning faithfulness, and selective machine unlearning under a SERB Government of India research grant.

Core Research Interests
Computer Vision Cattle & Livestock Analytics Video Action Recognition Deep Learning AI Safety & Alignment Role-Based Access Control Machine Unlearning
Aug 01, 2026 🏛️ Commenced my Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela! My research centers on Computer Vision for Cattle Behaviour Recognition under the prestigious ANRF PAIR (Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research) project.
Aug 20, 2025 🎉 Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025! Excited to share that “OrgAccess: A Benchmark for Role-Based Access Control in Organization-Scale LLMs” and “Investigating Pedagogical Teacher and Student LLM Agents” have both been accepted at EMNLP 2025.
Apr 10, 2025 Preprint of “Right Prediction, Wrong Reasoning: Uncovering LLM Misalignment in RA Disease Diagnosis” is available on Arxiv.

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Selected Publications

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  1. Preprint
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    Right Prediction, Wrong Reasoning: Uncovering LLM Misalignment in RA Disease Diagnosis
    Umakanta Maharana, Sarthak Verma, Avarna Agarwal, and 4 more authors
    2025
    Under review. Investigating the implications of LLM misalignment and reasoning faithfulness in medical diagnostics.
  2. OrgAccess: A Benchmark for Role-Based Access Control in Organization-Scale LLMs
    Debdeep SanyalUmakanta MaharanaHong Ming Tan, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) , 2025
    Accepted at EMNLP 2025. A benchmark evaluating whether models can reliably respect organizational roles, permissions, and access boundaries.
  3. Investigating Pedagogical Teacher and Student LLM Agents: Genetic Adaptation Meets Retrieval Augmented Generation Across Learning Style
    Debdeep Sanyal, Agniva Maiti, Umakanta Maharana, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) , 2025
    Accepted at EMNLP 2025. An adaptive framework integrating heterogeneous student agents with genetic teacher policy evolution.