Rabiul Awal

I am an incoming PhD student at Mila/University of Montreal. Currently, I am a research intern at the MAIR lab, Mila, Quebec AI Institute, under the supervision of Aishwarya Agrawal.

Before this, I completed my masters in Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. During my masters, I was also part of the SocialAI.Studio at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, working with Roy Ka-Wei Lee. Prior to moving to Canada, I spent two years as a software engineer at a Nordic startup. I completed my undergraduate studies in Computer Science at Noakhali Science and Technology University.

^Check archived talks from NLPDhaka here.

Research

Language + Vision

My meta-goal is to study compositionality for neural network generalization in out-of-distribution settings. I am interested in the fine-grained visio-linguistic understanding: the entanglement of objects in images (representation) and their comprehension through natural language queries. Additionally, I am also interested in representation learning and generative models.

• VisMin: Visual Minimal-Change Understanding (Preprint’24)
• Contrasting intra-modal and ranking cross-modal hard negatives to enhance visio-linguistic fine-grained understanding (CVPR’24)
• Investigating Prompting Techniques for Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Question Answering (CVPR’24 Workshop)
• CulturalVQA: Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Knowledge (CVPR’24 Workshop)

NLP for Social Good

My early research focuses on deep learning applications for tackling two social value tasks: online misinformation and hate speech in multiple languages.

• Evaluating GPT-3 Generated Explanations for Hateful Content Moderation (IJCAI23)
• Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection (TCSS22)
• MUSCAT: Multilingual Rumor Verification in Social Media Conversations (BIGDATA22)
• AngryBERT: Joint learning target and emotion for hate speech detection (PAKDD21)

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 october 2022