I'm a PhD student at Mila and University of Montreal, advised by Aishwarya Agrawal. This summer I'll join Qualcomm Research in Amsterdam as an intern. I work on generative models, world models, and reinforcement learning. My research is supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT).

I am inspired by the Era of Experience vision for scalable intelligence and excited about research in physical AI, particularly improved training and representation learning in generative models. To build agents that can operate effectively in large, complex environments, we need better representations and more scalable policy-gradient algorithms for learning from experience.

I feel a strange despair watching AI progress (can't literally sleep some nights)—the world we built from the age of reason now threatened by reasoning machines, yet I can't ignore the overwhelming beauty and potential of intelligence abundance. The closest description I've found is losing my religion.

Selected publications

See Google Scholar for the full list. *denotes equal contribution.

One Flow-Transformer for Imagination and Control. Rabiul Awal, Jinseong Jeong, Ankur Sikarwar, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Sai Rajeswar, Paul Hongsuck Seo, Aishwarya Agrawal. Under review, 2026. paper

Dynamics Forcing for Diffusion World Models. Rabiul Awal. Under review, 2026. paper

Grounding Computer-Use Agents from Demonstrations. Aarash Feizi, Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Kaixin Li, Rabiul Awal + 11 others. ICLR 2026. paper / website

The Promise of RL for Autoregressive Image Editing. Saba Ahmadi*, Rabiul Awal*, Ankur Sikarwar*, Amirhossein Kazemnejad*, Ge Ya Luo, Juan Rodriguez, Sai Rajeswar, Siva Reddy, Chris Pal, Benno Krojer, Aishwarya Agrawal. NeurIPS 2025. paper / twitter

Rendering-Aware RL for Vector Graphics Generation. Juan A. Rodriguez*, Haotian Zhang*, Abhay Puri, Aarash Feizi, Rishav Pramanik, Pascal Wichmann, Arnab Mondal, Mohammad Reza, Rabiul Awal + 6 others. NeurIPS 2025. paper / twitter

CTRL-O: Language-Controllable Object-Centric Representations. Aniket Rajiv Didolkar*, Andrii Zadaianchuk*, Rabiul Awal*, Maximilian Seitzer, Efstratios Gavves, Aishwarya Agrawal. CVPR 2025 – Spotlight at MAR Workshop @ CVPR'25. paper / website / twitter

VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding. Rabiul Awal*, Saba Ahmadi*, Le Zhang*, Aishwarya Agrawal. NeurIPS 2024. paper / website / code

Hard Negatives to Enhance Visio-Linguistic Compositional Understanding. Le Zhang, Rabiul Awal, Aishwarya Agrawal. CVPR 2024. paper / code

Misc

Talks I put extra care into, and a bit of teaching/organizing on the side.

Few-step diffusion modeling. Talk, Mila, 2026. slides

Score-based generative models and diffusion models. Talk, Mila, 2025. slides

World Modeling Workshop. Co-organizer, Mila, 2026. website

IFT 6765 – Links between Computer Vision and Language. Instructor, Mila, 2025