Himabindu Lakkaraju
Faculty
Harvard University
Himabindu Lakkaraju is on the faculty at Harvard University. With Aounon Kumar, she showed that crafted strategic text on a product page could push a language model to name that product its top recommendation.
Interpretable Machine Learning at Harvard
Lakkaraju's broader research agenda is in interpretable and trustworthy machine learning, including how people understand and contest model decisions.
Harvard faculty pages and her lab's public work place her among researchers who study fairness, explanation, and misuse risks in modern models.
Manipulating LLMs for Product Visibility
The 2024 paper Manipulating Large Language Models to Increase Product Visibility, with Aounon Kumar, demonstrated that strategic text sequences on a product page could steer a language model toward naming that product as a top recommendation. The authors released code and tied the risk to fair market competition.
Major news coverage helped the paper travel beyond arXiv.