I’m a PhD student at Mila - Quebec AI Institute and University of Montreal with Aishwarya Agrawal. I’m also a visiting researcher at Multimodal Foundation Models Team, ServiceNow Research with Sai Rajeswar.

Prior to Mila, I received an MSc in CS from University of Saskatchewan and BSc in CS from Noakhali Science and Technology University.

Research

Building AI systems that truly understand the physical world is an exciting frontier. My research focuses on two core problems: (1) learning rich visual representations that capture the true structure of the world, and (2) developing controllable generative (diffusion) models that can create (or simulate) with intention. This naturally connects to alignment, as systems that understand the world must develop theory of mind to grasp human values.

Highlighted Work

See my Google Scholar for a full list of publications.

WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation

Rabiul Awal et al.

DL4C Workshop @ ICLR'25

Paper

CTRL-O: Language-Controllable Object-Centric Visual Representation Learning

Aniket Rajiv Didolkar∗, Andrii Zadaianchuk∗, Rabiul Awal∗, Maximilian Seitzer, Efstratios Gavves, Aishwarya Agrawal

CVPR'25

Paper Website Twitter

BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan Rodriguez, Xiangru Jian, Siba Panigrahi, Tianyu Zhang, Aarash Feizi, Abhay Puri, Akshay Kalkunte, François Savard, Ahmed Masry, Shravan Nayak, Rabiul Awal et al.

ICLR'25

Website Paper Dataset Twitter

VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding

Rabiul Awal*, Saba Ahmadi*, Le Zhang*, Aishwarya Agrawal

NeurIPS'24

Paper Website Twitter

Contrasting intra-modal and ranking cross-modal hard negatives to enhance visio-linguistic fine-grained understanding

Le Zhang, Rabiul Awal, Aishwarya Agrawal

CVPR'24

Paper Code Twitter

CulturalVQA: Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Knowledge

S. Nayak, K. Jain, R. Awal, et al.

EMNLP'24 (Oral)

Website OpenReview Paper Twitter

Blog

I occasionally write on how-to-cs-grad, coding, ai research, and systematic failure in Bangladesh.

Contact

Please send me an email if you are interested in collaboration or need help with grad apps and how-to-cs-undergrad.

rabiul.awal @ mila dot quebec
awalrabiul6 @ gmail dot com

updated september 2024