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Md Awsafur Rahman

PhD Student at UC Santa Barbara | Ex-Intern @ Amazon | Ex - Google | Kaggle Grandmaster

Hello! I’m a PhD student in the ECE department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), currently working on multi-modal reasoning, visual agents, and generative AI at the Vision Research Lab (VRL). I recently interned as an Applied Scientist at Amazon working on LLM Memory and Personalization.

Before starting my PhD, I worked for Google on LLMs, tackling problems like mathematical reasoning, prompt retrieval, and detecting LLM-generated content. After completing my undergrad, I also worked at the Institute of Robotics and Automation (IRAB) at BUET on synthetic media detection.

Just like a detective, I find joy in dissecting complex problems and crafting solutions through code and math. This passion led me to compete on platforms like Kaggle and DrivenData. It was here that I became one of the youngest Kaggle Grandmasters, peaking at 5th (currently 11th) out of 61,000+ competitors. I also take pride in contributing to open-source projects on GitHub, on platforms such as Keras, TensorFlow, HuggingFace, YOLOv5, etc. My contributions have earned me the Google OSS Prize four times and the Kaggle ML Research Award.

Interests

  • Multi-modal Reasoning LLM
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Object Recognition
  • Media Forensics
  • Generative AI

Education

  • PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering (2024 - Present)
    University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA
  • BSc in Electrical & Electronic Engineering (2018 - 2023)
    Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Bangladesh

News

Jun 16, 2025 Started Internship at Amazon as Applied Scientist
Feb 10, 2025 SONICS paper has been accepted to ICLR 2025.
Sep 22, 2024 Started PhD at UC Santa Barbara.
Dec 1, 2023 Started working for Google in the Keras Team as a Contractor.
Oct 9, 2023 Awarded Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award for gcvit-tf and TransUNet-tf.
Aug 15, 2023 Symbiotic Transformer paper has been accepted to WACV 2024
Jul 17, 2023 DwinFormer paper has been accepted to IEEE Sensors Journal (Q1, IF: 4.3)
Jun 22, 2023 ArtiFact paper has been accepted at ICIP 2023
Jun 1, 2023 Joined IRAB (Institue of Robotics & Automation BUET) as Research Assistant.
Sep 10, 2022 Ranked 1st on LB in IEEE VIP Cup 2022: Synthetic Image Detection at ICIP 2022.

Selected Publications

2026

  1. /assets/paper/likebench/animation.gif
    LikeBench: Evaluating Subjective Likability in LLMs for Personalization
    Md Awsafur Rahman, Adam Gabryś, Daniel Kang, and 3 more authors
    Preparing for ACL, 2026
  2. /assets/paper/click2graph/animation.gif
    Click2Graph: Interactive Panoptic Video Scene Graphs from a Single Click
    Raphael Ruschel, Hardik Prajapati, Md Awsafur Rahman, and 1 more author
    Under Review CVPR, 2026

2025

  1. /assets/paper/sonics/sonics.gif
    SONICS: Synthetic Or Not - Identifying Counterfeit Songs
    Md Awsafur Rahman, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, Najibul Haque Sarker, and 2 more authors
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
  2. CVPR
    Temporally Consistent Dynamic Scene Graphs: An End-to-End Approach for Action Tracklet Generation
    Raphael Ruschel, Md Awsafur Rahman, Hardik Prajapati, and 2 more authors
    Under Review at CVPR 2026, 2025

2024

  1. /assets/paper/syn-tra/animation.gif
    Semi-Supervised Semantic Depth Estimation using Symbiotic Transformer and NearFarMix Augmentation
    Md Awsafur Rahman, and Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
    WACV, 2024
  2. /assets/paper/syn-att/animation.gif
    Syn-Att: Synthetic Speech Attribution via Semi-Supervised Unknown Multi-Class Ensemble of CNNs
    Md Awsafur Rahman, Bishmoy Paul, Najibul Haque Sarker, and 3 more authors
    2024

2023

  1. /assets/paper/dwinformer/animation.gif
    DwinFormer: Dual Window Transformers for End-to-End Monocular Depth Estimation
    Md Awsafur Rahman, and Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
    IEEE Sensors Journal, 2023
  2. /assets/paper/artifact/animation.gif
    ArtiFact: A Large-Scale Dataset with Artificial and Factual Images for Generalizable and Robust Synthetic Image Detection
    Md Awsafur Rahman, Bishmoy Paul, Najibul Haque Sarker, and 2 more authors
    ICIP, 2023
  3. /assets/paper/ciff-net/animation.gif
    CIFF-Net: Contextual Image Feature Fusion for Melanoma Diagnosis
    Md Awsafur Rahman, Bishmoy Paul, Tanvir Mahmud, and 1 more author
    Elsevier BSPC, 2023

2022

  1. /assets/paper/embc22/animation.gif
    A Deep Learning Scheme for Detecting Atrial Fibrillation Based on Fusion of Raw and Discrete Wavelet Transformed ECG Features
    Md Awsafur Rahman, Shahed Ahmed, and Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
    In EMBC, 2022

2021

  1. /assets/paper/covsegnet/animation.gif
    CovSegNet: A multi encoder–decoder architecture for improved lesion segmentation of COVID-19 chest CT scans
    Tanvir Mahmud, Md Awsafur Rahman, Shaikh Anowarul Fattah, and 1 more author
    IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2021

2020

  1. /assets/paper/covxnet/animation.gif
    CovXNet: A multi-dilation convolutional neural network for automatic COVID-19 and other pneumonia detection from chest X-ray images with transferable multi-receptive feature optimization
    Tanvir Mahmud, Md Awsafur Rahman, and Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
    Computers in biology and medicine, 2020