Rabiul Awal Photo

I'm a PhD student at Mila - Quebec AI Institute and University of Montreal with Aishwarya Agrawal. I was previously a visiting researcher at ServiceNow Research. I received an MSc in CS from University of Saskatchewan and BSc in CS from Noakhali Science and Technology University.

Research

I work on world models and decision making — the era of experience. I focus on few-step generative models (e.g. diffusion and flow), representation learning, and control. I've also worked on vision-language models before.

See my Google Scholar for a full list of publications. *denotes equal contribution.

RL for Image Editing

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'25

Rendering-Aware RL

Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning 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'25

WebMMU

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

Rabiul Awal, Mahsa Massoud, Aarash Feizi, Zichao Li + 9 others

EMNLP'25 (Main)Oral

CTRL-O

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

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

CVPR'25 Spotlight at MAR Workshop @ CVPR'25

VisMin

VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding

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

NeurIPS'24

Compositional CLIP

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

Le Zhang, Rabiul Awal, Aishwarya Agrawal

CVPR'24 Spotlight at O-DRUM Workshop @ CVPR'23

CulturalVQA

CulturalVQA: Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Knowledge

Shravan Nayak, Kanishk Jain, Rabiul Awal + 5 others

EMNLP'24 Oral

Academic Service