Afra Feyza Akyürek

I am a Research Scientist at Scale AI, working on LLM post-training and evaluation. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Boston University in May 2025.

My research focuses on self-learning and enhancing language model interactions to be more akin to human-like communication. Having inspired by how humans modify their knowledge and beliefs through feedback received in natural language or garnered from the environment, my specific interest lies in how such feedback, expressed in natural language, can guide a language model’s outputs to align with facts, requirements, natural phenomena, or preferences. My aim is to develop methods that enable language models to incorporate this feedback consistently, thereby enhancing their reliability.

During my PhD, I had the privilege of being guided by Derry Wijaya. I had the enriching experience of collaborating with the talented teams at Allen AI, Apple and I often collaborated with Jacob Andreas at MIT.

biography

I was born and raised in the beautiful coastal city of Izmir in Turkey. I studied at Izmir Fen Lisesi where I met my favorite person on Earth. I have taken the nation-wide college admission test and was ranked 31st amid two million exam takers. I moved to Istanbul to study at Koc University and spent five amazing years double-majoring Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering. Ekin and I married in 2018 and moved to the US where I started my PhD in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon. I later moved to Boston to do my PhD in Computer Science at Boston University, working on Natural Language Processing, and graduated in May 2025. I am now a Research Scientist at Scale AI working on LLM post-training.

I am coming from a family of avid travelers and try to keep the spirit alive in the little family of ours 😍🌍🗺️🏝️