Workday AI Research

Research

We build AI for the world of work—and we do it in the open, alongside the research community.

Workday’s research advances the science behind enterprise AI: agents you can trust, systems that scale, and decision intelligence grounded in real organizational data. Our teams publish at the field's leading venues, including ACL, ICML, ICLR, and WWW.

7 papers accepted at top-tier venues in 2026—spanning trustworthy AI, agent memory and systems, and efficient ML.

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Featured Research

Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems

ACL Industry 2026 (Oral, top 1%) · Jul 2026

Enterprise NLP is only as valuable as users’ trust in it. This work develops robust explanations that help people understand and rely on model outputs in high-stakes settings.

Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting

Deployment-Time Memorization in Foundation-Model Agents

ICML 2026 (Oral, top 2%) · Jul 2026

As foundation-model agents scale, deployment-time memorization creates capability and privacy risks for enterprise settings.

Lei (Rachel) Chen, Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Dalmo Cirne, Andy Olsen, Xu Chu, Zeke Miller, Alet Blanken, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting

Adaptive Memory Admission Control for LLM Agents

ICLR 2026 (MemAgents) · Apr 2026

Adaptive admission control helps LLM agents decide what to retain, improving efficiency and reliability in long-running tasks.

Guilin Zhang, Wei Jiang, Xiejiashan Wang, Aisha Behr, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun

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Workday AI Research PhD Fellowship

From PhD to Enterprise AI

The Workday AI Research PhD Fellowship supports exceptional doctoral students working at the intersection of AI and enterprise software.

Fellows receive funding, direct research collaboration with Workday AI researchers, and a clear pathway into full-time roles at Workday.

We welcome submissions in all areas related to Workday AI.

Explore research

All research publications.

Explore publications from Workday researchers advancing trustworthy AI, intelligent agent systems, and efficient machine learning for the world of work.

    • Trustworthy & Explainable AI

    Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems

    ACL Industry 2026 (Oral, top 4%) · Jul 2026

    Enterprise AI systems are only as valuable as the trust users place in them, requiring explanations that remain consistent even when faced with messy, real-world data.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting

    This work introduces a unified framework to evaluate AI explanation robustness under realistic conditions, revealing that modern large language models deliver substantially more stable and reliable reasoning than traditional NLP models. By mapping these stability gains to inference costs, we equip organizations with a practical guide to confidently deploy trustworthy AI in high-stakes, compliance-sensitive enterprise settings.

     

    Read the paper

    • Agent Systems & Memory

    Deployment-Time Memorization in Foundation-Model Agents

    ICML 2026 (Memory ws, Oral, top 2%) · Jul 2026

    A study of what foundation-model agents memorize at deployment time and what it means for enterprise privacy.

    • ''

      Lei (Rachel) Chen, Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Dalmo Cirne, Andy Olsen, Xu Chu, Zeke Miller, Alet Blanken, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting

    Enterprise AI systems are increasingly moving from stateless assistants to long-lived agents that remember users across interactions, but this capability introduces critical new privacy risks. This work develops a unified framework to measure and mitigate deployment-time memorization, demonstrating that strategic memory design choices can drastically reduce the risk of secret extraction while preserving the personalized utility that users expect in high-stakes enterprise settings.

     

    Read the paper

    • Efficient ML & Systems

    When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control

    ICML 2026 (Demo) · Jul 2026

    A benchmark study identifying when deep reinforcement learning genuinely outperforms strong calibrated baselines for adaptive resource control.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, C. Sun, Kai Zhao, Xu Chu, S. Sarkani, J. Fossaceca

    Six reinforcement learning algorithms are evaluated against a properly calibrated rule-based baseline across a variety of workload patterns. Experiments uncover counter-intuitive findings: calibrated rule-based baselines often outperform reinforcement learning; and discrete-action algorithms are significantly better than continuous-action ones for this task.

     

    Read the paper

    • Autonomous Research / RL

    EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

    ICML 2026 (RLxF) · Jul 2026

    A method that uses world feedback to detect and correct reward overoptimization in shared, multi-tenant RLHF platforms.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, C. Sun, Kai Zhao, Xu Chu, S. Sarkani, J. Fossaceca

    EvalStop serves as a composable scheduling primitive that monitors evaluation scores, terminating jobs when quality irrecoverably declines to free resources and preserve the best checkpoint. By treating scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem, EvalStop successfully identifies reward-hacking without altering the training process, resulting in substantially improved job completion times and reduced wasted compute across various scheduling environments.

     

    Read the paper

    • Agent Systems & Memory

    Adaptive Memory Admission Control for LLM Agents

    ICLR 2026 (MemAgents) · Apr 2026

    Adaptive admission control that decides what enters an LLM agent's long-term memory, improving long-horizon efficiency and reliability.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Wei Jiang, Xiejiashan Wang, Aisha Behr, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun

    As AI agents increasingly engage in extended interactions, indiscriminate memory storage leads to bloated systems, slower retrieval, and the retention of hallucinated or outdated facts. This work introduces Adaptive Memory Admission Control (A-MAC), a framework that evaluates incoming memories across five interpretable dimensions such as factual confidence and future utility to ensure that only relevant and reliable information is retained. By explicitly preventing hallucinated content from polluting long-term memory, A-MAC offers a transparent, scalable solution for maintaining efficient and trustworthy agent architectures in complex enterprise environments.

     

    Read the paper

    • Trustworthy & Explainable AI

    RobustExplain: Evaluating Robustness of LLM-Based Explanation Agents for Recommendation

    WWW 2026 Companion · Mar 2026

    An evaluation framework for the robustness of LLM-based explanation agents in enterprise recommendation settings.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu

    Agent-driven recommender systems are only as valuable as the trust users place in their reasoning, yet user interaction data is inherently messy. This work introduces RobustExplain to systematically measure how well AI-generated explanations hold up against realistic user behavior noise, such as accidental clicks or shifting preferences, helping organizations build reliable, transparent, and trustworthy recommendation engines for real-world enterprise applications.

     

    Read the paper

    • Agent Systems & Memory

    LLMs as Orchestrators: Constraint-Compliant Multi-Agent Optimization for Recommendation Systems

    WWW 2026 Companion · Mar 2026

    Using LLMs to orchestrate constraint-compliant multi-agent optimization for enterprise recommendation systems.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu

    Enterprise recommendation engines must balance multiple conflicting goals like accuracy and diversity while strictly satisfying hard business constraints, such as seller fairness and new-item exposure. This work introduces DualAgent-Rec, an innovative framework that uses a LLM as a high-level orchestrator to dynamically manage two specialized optimization agents. By adaptively balancing exploration and exploitation, DualAgent-Rec achieves 100% constraint satisfaction and superior performance trade-offs, providing a robust and scalable solution for real-world, compliance-sensitive recommendation environments.

     

    Read the paper

    • Trustworthy & Explainable AI

    Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems

    ACL Industry 2026 (Oral, top 4%) · Jul 2026

    Enterprise AI systems are only as valuable as the trust users place in them, requiring explanations that remain consistent even when faced with messy, real-world data.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting

    This work introduces a unified framework to evaluate AI explanation robustness under realistic conditions, revealing that modern large language models deliver substantially more stable and reliable reasoning than traditional NLP models. By mapping these stability gains to inference costs, we equip organizations with a practical guide to confidently deploy trustworthy AI in high-stakes, compliance-sensitive enterprise settings.

     

    Read the paper

    • Trustworthy & Explainable AI

    RobustExplain: Evaluating Robustness of LLM-Based Explanation Agents for Recommendation

    WWW 2026 Companion · Mar 2026

    An evaluation framework for the robustness of LLM-based explanation agents in enterprise recommendation settings.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu

    Agent-driven recommender systems are only as valuable as the trust users place in their reasoning, yet user interaction data is inherently messy. This work introduces RobustExplain to systematically measure how well AI-generated explanations hold up against realistic user behavior noise, such as accidental clicks or shifting preferences, helping organizations build reliable, transparent, and trustworthy recommendation engines for real-world enterprise applications.

     

    Read the paper

    • Agent Systems & Memory

    Deployment-Time Memorization in Foundation-Model Agents

    ICML 2026 (Memory ws, Oral, top 2%) · Jul 2026

    A study of what foundation-model agents memorize at deployment time and what it means for enterprise privacy.

    • ''

      Lei (Rachel) Chen, Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Dalmo Cirne, Andy Olsen, Xu Chu, Zeke Miller, Alet Blanken, Amine Anoun, Jerry Ting

    Enterprise AI systems are increasingly moving from stateless assistants to long-lived agents that remember users across interactions, but this capability introduces critical new privacy risks. This work develops a unified framework to measure and mitigate deployment-time memorization, demonstrating that strategic memory design choices can drastically reduce the risk of secret extraction while preserving the personalized utility that users expect in high-stakes enterprise settings.

     

    Read the paper

    • Agent Systems & Memory

    Adaptive Memory Admission Control for LLM Agents

    ICLR 2026 (MemAgents) · Apr 2026

    Adaptive admission control that decides what enters an LLM agent's long-term memory, improving long-horizon efficiency and reliability.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Wei Jiang, Xiejiashan Wang, Aisha Behr, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu, Amine Anoun

    As AI agents increasingly engage in extended interactions, indiscriminate memory storage leads to bloated systems, slower retrieval, and the retention of hallucinated or outdated facts. This work introduces Adaptive Memory Admission Control (A-MAC), a framework that evaluates incoming memories across five interpretable dimensions such as factual confidence and future utility to ensure that only relevant and reliable information is retained. By explicitly preventing hallucinated content from polluting long-term memory, A-MAC offers a transparent, scalable solution for maintaining efficient and trustworthy agent architectures in complex enterprise environments.

     

    Read the paper

    • Agent Systems & Memory

    LLMs as Orchestrators: Constraint-Compliant Multi-Agent Optimization for Recommendation Systems

    WWW 2026 Companion · Mar 2026

    Using LLMs to orchestrate constraint-compliant multi-agent optimization for enterprise recommendation systems.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, Kai Zhao, Jeffrey Friedman, Xu Chu

    Enterprise recommendation engines must balance multiple conflicting goals like accuracy and diversity while strictly satisfying hard business constraints, such as seller fairness and new-item exposure. This work introduces DualAgent-Rec, an innovative framework that uses a LLM as a high-level orchestrator to dynamically manage two specialized optimization agents. By adaptively balancing exploration and exploitation, DualAgent-Rec achieves 100% constraint satisfaction and superior performance trade-offs, providing a robust and scalable solution for real-world, compliance-sensitive recommendation environments.

     

    Read the paper

    • Efficient ML & Systems

    When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control

    ICML 2026 (Demo) · Jul 2026

    A benchmark study identifying when deep reinforcement learning genuinely outperforms strong calibrated baselines for adaptive resource control.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, C. Sun, Kai Zhao, Xu Chu, S. Sarkani, J. Fossaceca

    Six reinforcement learning algorithms are evaluated against a properly calibrated rule-based baseline across a variety of workload patterns. Experiments uncover counter-intuitive findings: calibrated rule-based baselines often outperform reinforcement learning; and discrete-action algorithms are significantly better than continuous-action ones for this task.

     

    Read the paper

    • Autonomous Research / RL

    EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

    ICML 2026 (RLxF) · Jul 2026

    A method that uses world feedback to detect and correct reward overoptimization in shared, multi-tenant RLHF platforms.

    • ''

      Guilin Zhang, C. Sun, Kai Zhao, Xu Chu, S. Sarkani, J. Fossaceca

    EvalStop serves as a composable scheduling primitive that monitors evaluation scores, terminating jobs when quality irrecoverably declines to free resources and preserve the best checkpoint. By treating scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem, EvalStop successfully identifies reward-hacking without altering the training process, resulting in substantially improved job completion times and reduced wasted compute across various scheduling environments.

     

    Read the paper

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