arXiv subjects

Nazia Tasnim

Publications and source records attributed to Nazia Tasnim.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Seeing Isn't Orienting: A Cognitively Informed Hierarchical Benchmark for Object Orientation in MLLMs

Humans develop object orientation understanding progressively, from recognizing which way an object faces to reasoning about orientations across multiple objects. Yet existing vision-language benchmarks largely conflate orientation with broader spatial reasoning. We introduce Discriminative Orientation Reasoning Intelligence (DORI), a cognition-informed hierarchical benchmark that establishes object orientation as the primary evaluation target. DORI decomposes orientation into four dimensions, each evaluated at coarse (categorical) and granular (metric) levels, yielding 33,656 multiple-choice questions over 13,652 real-world and synthetic images from 14 sources. Its design isolates orientation from confounding factors through object isolation, standardized reference frames, and structured prompts. Evaluating 26 state-of-the-art vision-language models reveals a consistent limitation: models strong on general spatial benchmarks remain near-random on object-centric orientation reasoning. The best model achieves only 64.2\% on coarse and 42.9\% on granular judgments, with the largest drops on compound rotations and inter-object reference frame shifts. Large coarse-to-granular performance gaps further indicate reliance on categorical heuristics rather than geometric reasoning. These results establish object orientation understanding as a fundamental open challenge for multimodal systems. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/appledora/DORI-Benchmark

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Representation-Aware Unlearning via Activation Signatures: From Suppression to Entity-Signature Erasure

Entity-level unlearning is usually evaluated by what a model says: whether it stops naming the target, refuses a query, or shifts a Truth Ratio distribution. These output-level tests, however, do not show whether a subject's internal representation has been attenuated. We introduce the Entity Representation Unlearning Framework (ERUF), a representation-aware framework that mines subject-specific activation signatures, suppresses the corresponding activation direction, and distills the behavior into LoRA parameters. Among evaluated baselines, ERUF is the only method that jointly achieves surface-level suppression, internal attenuation, and utility preservation. On TOFU forget10, ERUF achieves FQ = 0.99 and MU = 0.62, matching reported oracle utility while approaching oracle forget quality. Across most standard foundation-model settings, ERUF maintains low leakage and low internal target activation, with SMR between 0.00% and 1.10%, EL10 below 0.06, and utility drift below 3%. On Llama-3.1-8B, adversarial entity recovery falls from 63.89% to 20.15%, while name-agnostic recovery decreases by 72.7% to 77.4%. Joint surface/internal diagnostics further reveal scale-dependent behavior in reasoning-prior models that surface metrics alone would miss. We interpret these results as operational evidence of representation-level attenuation, not as a formal guarantee of irreversible deletion.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Decompose, Mix, Adapt: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Neural Network Recombination and Compression

Parameter Recombination (PR) methods aim to efficiently compose the weights of a neural network for applications like Parameter-Efficient FineTuning (PEFT) and Model Compression (MC), among others. Most methods typically focus on one application of PR, which can make composing them challenging. For example, when deploying a large model you may wish to compress the model and also quickly adapt to new settings. However, PEFT methods often can still contain millions of parameters. This may be small compared to the original model size, but can be problematic in resource constrained deployments like edge devices, where they take a larger portion of the compressed model's parameters. To address this, we present Coefficient-gated weight Recombination by Interpolated Shared basis Projections (CRISP), a general approach that seamlessly integrates multiple PR tasks within the same framework. CRISP accomplishes this by factorizing pretrained weights into basis matrices and their component mixing projections. Sharing basis matrices across layers and adjusting its size enables us to perform MC, whereas the mixer weight's small size (fewer than 200 in some experiments) enables CRISP to support PEFT. Experiments show CRISP outperforms methods from prior work capable of dual-task applications by 4-5\% while also outperforming the state-of-the-art in PEFT by 1.5\% and PEFT+MC combinations by 1\%. Our code is available on the repository: https://github.com/appledora/CRISP-CVPR26.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Seeing Isn't Orienting: A Cognitively Grounded Benchmark Reveals Systematic Orientation Failures in MLLMs Supplementary

Humans learn object orientation progressively, from recognizing which way an object faces, to mentally rotating it, to reasoning about orientations between objects. Current vision-language benchmarks largely conflate orientation with position and general scene understanding. We introduce Discriminative Orientation Reasoning Intelligence (DORI), a cognitively grounded hierarchical benchmark that makes object orientation the primary target. Inspired by stages of human orientation cognition, DORI decomposes orientation into four dimensions, each evaluated at coarse (categorical) and granular (metric) levels. Composed from 13,652 images across 14 sources, DORI provides 33,656 multiple-choice questions covering 67 object categories in real-world and synthetic settings. Its coarse-to-granular design isolates orientation from confounds such as object recognition difficulty, scene clutter, and linguistic ambiguity via bounding-box isolation, standardized spatial reference frames, and structured prompts. Evaluating 24 state-of-the-art vision-language models shows a clear pattern: models that perform well on general spatial benchmarks are near-random on object-centric orientation tasks. The best models reach only 54.2% on coarse and 45.0% on granular judgments, with largest failures on compound rotations and shifts in inter-object reference frames. Large coarse-to-granular gaps reveal reliance on categorical heuristics rather than geometric reasoning, a limitation hidden by existing benchmarks. These results identify orientation understanding as an unsolved challenge for multimodal systems, with implications for robotic manipulation, 3D scene reconstruction, and human-AI interaction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Are ASR foundation models generalized enough to capture features of regional dialects for low-resource languages?

Conventional research on speech recognition modeling relies on the canonical form for most low-resource languages while automatic speech recognition (ASR) for regional dialects is treated as a fine-tuning task. To investigate the effects of dialectal variations on ASR we develop a 78-hour annotated Bengali Speech-to-Text (STT) corpus named Ben-10. Investigation from linguistic and data-driven perspectives shows that speech foundation models struggle heavily in regional dialect ASR, both in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We observe that all deep learning methods struggle to model speech data under dialectal variations but dialect specific model training alleviates the issue. Our dataset also serves as a out of-distribution (OOD) resource for ASR modeling under constrained resources in ASR algorithms. The dataset and code developed for this project are publicly available

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

RegSpeech12: A Regional Corpus of Bengali Spontaneous Speech Across Dialects

The Bengali language, spoken extensively across South Asia and among diasporic communities, exhibits considerable dialectal diversity shaped by geography, culture, and history. Phonological and pronunciation-based classifications broadly identify five principal dialect groups: Eastern Bengali, Manbhumi, Rangpuri, Varendri, and Rarhi. Within Bangladesh, further distinctions emerge through variation in vocabulary, syntax, and morphology, as observed in regions such as Chittagong, Sylhet, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Noakhali, and Barishal. Despite this linguistic richness, systematic research on the computational processing of Bengali dialects remains limited. This study seeks to document and analyze the phonetic and morphological properties of these dialects while exploring the feasibility of building computational models particularly Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems tailored to regional varieties. Such efforts hold potential for applications in virtual assistants and broader language technologies, contributing to both the preservation of dialectal diversity and the advancement of inclusive digital tools for Bengali-speaking communities. The dataset created for this study is released for public use.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

From Facts to Folklore: Evaluating Large Language Models on Bengali Cultural Knowledge

Recent progress in NLP research has demonstrated remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. While recent multilingual benchmarks have advanced cultural evaluation for LLMs, critical gaps remain in capturing the nuances of low-resource cultures. Our work addresses these limitations through a Bengali Language Cultural Knowledge (BLanCK) dataset including folk traditions, culinary arts, and regional dialects. Our investigation of several multilingual language models shows that while these models perform well in non-cultural categories, they struggle significantly with cultural knowledge and performance improves substantially across all models when context is provided, emphasizing context-aware architectures and culturally curated training data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

RECAST: Reparameterized, Compact weight Adaptation for Sequential Tasks

Incremental learning aims to adapt to new sets of categories over time with minimal computational overhead. Prior work often addresses this task by training efficient task-specific adaptors that modify frozen layer weights or features to capture relevant information without affecting predictions on previously learned categories. While these adaptors are generally more efficient than finetuning the entire network, they still require tens to hundreds of thousands of task-specific trainable parameters even for relatively small networks, making it challenging to operate on resource-constrained environments with high communication costs like edge devices or mobile phones. Thus, we propose Reparameterized, Compact weight Adaptation for Sequential Tasks (RECAST), a novel method that dramatically reduces task-specific trainable parameters to fewer than 50 - several orders of magnitude less than competing methods like LoRA. RECAST accomplishes this efficiency by learning to decompose layer weights into a soft parameter-sharing framework consisting of shared weight templates and very few module-specific scaling factors or coefficients. This soft parameter-sharing framework allows for effective task-wise reparameterization by tuning only these coefficients while keeping templates frozen.A key innovation of RECAST is the novel weight reconstruction pipeline called Neural Mimicry, which eliminates the need for pretraining from scratch. This allows for high-fidelity emulation of existing pretrained weights within our framework and provides quick adaptability to any model scale and architecture. Extensive experiments across six datasets demonstrate RECAST outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 3% across various scales, architectures, and parameter spaces Moreover, we show that RECAST's architecture-agnostic nature allows for seamless integration with existing methods, further boosting performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Vision-LLMs Can Fool Themselves with Self-Generated Typographic Attacks

Typographic attacks, adding misleading text to images, can deceive vision-language models (LVLMs). The susceptibility of recent large LVLMs like GPT4-V to such attacks is understudied, raising concerns about amplified misinformation in personal assistant applications. Previous attacks use simple strategies, such as random misleading words, which don't fully exploit LVLMs' language reasoning abilities. We introduce an experimental setup for testing typographic attacks on LVLMs and propose two novel self-generated attacks: (1) Class-based attacks, where the model identifies a similar class to deceive itself, and (2) Reasoned attacks, where an advanced LVLM suggests an attack combining a deceiving class and description. Our experiments show these attacks significantly reduce classification performance by up to 60\% and are effective across different models, including InstructBLIP and MiniGPT4. Code: https://github.com/mqraitem/Self-Gen-Typo-Attack

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Integrating A.I. in Higher Education: Protocol for a Pilot Study with 'SAMCares: An Adaptive Learning Hub'

Learning never ends, and there is no age limit to grow yourself. However, the educational landscape may face challenges in effectively catering to students' inclusion and diverse learning needs. These students should have access to state-of-the-art methods for lecture delivery, online resources, and technology needs. However, with all the diverse learning sources, it becomes harder for students to comprehend a large amount of knowledge in a short period of time. Traditional assistive technologies and learning aids often lack the dynamic adaptability required for individualized education plans. Large Language Models (LLM) have been used in language translation, text summarization, and content generation applications. With rapid growth in AI over the past years, AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants have been developed. This research aims to bridge this gap by introducing an innovative study buddy we will be calling the 'SAMCares'. The system leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) (in our case, LLaMa-2 70B as the base model) and Retriever-Augmented Generation (RAG) to offer real-time, context-aware, and adaptive educational support. The context of the model will be limited to the knowledge base of Sam Houston State University (SHSU) course notes. The LLM component enables a chat-like environment to interact with it to meet the unique learning requirements of each student. For this, we will build a custom web-based GUI. At the same time, RAG enhances real-time information retrieval and text generation, in turn providing more accurate and context-specific assistance. An option to upload additional study materials in the web GUI is added in case additional knowledge support is required. The system's efficacy will be evaluated through controlled trials and iterative feedback mechanisms.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Mapping Violence: Developing an Extensive Framework to Build a Bangla Sectarian Expression Dataset from Social Media Interactions

Communal violence in online forums has become extremely prevalent in South Asia, where many communities of different cultures coexist and share resources. These societies exhibit a phenomenon characterized by strong bonds within their own groups and animosity towards others, leading to conflicts that frequently escalate into violent confrontations. To address this issue, we have developed the first comprehensive framework for the automatic detection of communal violence markers in online Bangla content accompanying the largest collection (13K raw sentences) of social media interactions that fall under the definition of four major violence class and their 16 coarse expressions. Our workflow introduces a 7-step expert annotation process incorporating insights from social scientists, linguists, and psychologists. By presenting data statistics and benchmarking performance using this dataset, we have determined that, aside from the category of Non-communal violence, Religio-communal violence is particularly pervasive in Bangla text. Moreover, we have substantiated the effectiveness of fine-tuning language models in identifying violent comments by conducting preliminary benchmarking on the state-of-the-art Bangla deep learning model.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

OOD-Speech: A Large Bengali Speech Recognition Dataset for Out-of-Distribution Benchmarking

We present OOD-Speech, the first out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarking dataset for Bengali automatic speech recognition (ASR). Being one of the most spoken languages globally, Bengali portrays large diversity in dialects and prosodic features, which demands ASR frameworks to be robust towards distribution shifts. For example, islamic religious sermons in Bengali are delivered with a tonality that is significantly different from regular speech. Our training dataset is collected via massively online crowdsourcing campaigns which resulted in 1177.94 hours collected and curated from $22,645$ native Bengali speakers from South Asia. Our test dataset comprises 23.03 hours of speech collected and manually annotated from 17 different sources, e.g., Bengali TV drama, Audiobook, Talk show, Online class, and Islamic sermons to name a few. OOD-Speech is jointly the largest publicly available speech dataset, as well as the first out-of-distribution ASR benchmarking dataset for Bengali.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2022

VISTA: Vision Transformer enhanced by U-Net and Image Colorfulness Frame Filtration for Automatic Retail Checkout

Multi-class product counting and recognition identifies product items from images or videos for automated retail checkout. The task is challenging due to the real-world scenario of occlusions where product items overlap, fast movement in the conveyor belt, large similarity in overall appearance of the items being scanned, novel products, and the negative impact of misidentifying items. Further, there is a domain bias between training and test sets, specifically, the provided training dataset consists of synthetic images and the test set videos consist of foreign objects such as hands and tray. To address these aforementioned issues, we propose to segment and classify individual frames from a video sequence. The segmentation method consists of a unified single product item- and hand-segmentation followed by entropy masking to address the domain bias problem. The multi-class classification method is based on Vision Transformers (ViT). To identify the frames with target objects, we utilize several image processing methods and propose a custom metric to discard frames not having any product items. Combining all these mechanisms, our best system achieves 3rd place in the AI City Challenge 2022 Track 4 with an F1 score of 0.4545. Code will be available at

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

TEAM-Atreides at SemEval-2022 Task 11: On leveraging data augmentation and ensemble to recognize complex Named Entities in Bangla

Many areas, such as the biological and healthcare domain, artistic works, and organization names, have nested, overlapping, discontinuous entity mentions that may even be syntactically or semantically ambiguous in practice. Traditional sequence tagging algorithms are unable to recognize these complex mentions because they may violate the assumptions upon which sequence tagging schemes are founded. In this paper, we describe our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 11 on identifying such complex Named Entities. We have leveraged the ensemble of multiple ELECTRA-based models that were exclusively pretrained on the Bangla language with the performance of ELECTRA-based models pretrained on English to achieve competitive performance on the Track-11. Besides providing a system description, we will also present the outcomes of our experiments on architectural decisions, dataset augmentations, and post-competition findings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Exploring the Scope and Potential of Local Newspaper-based Dengue Surveillance in Bangladesh

Dengue fever has been considered to be one of the global public health problems of the twenty-first century, especially in tropical and subtropical countries of the global south. The high morbidity and mortality rates of Dengue fever impose a huge economic and health burden for middle and low-income countries. It is so prevalent in such regions that enforcing a granular level of surveillance is quite impossible. Therefore, it is crucial to explore an alternative cost-effective solution that can provide updates of the ongoing situation in a timely manner. In this paper, we explore the scope and potential of a local newspaper-based dengue surveillance system, using well-known data-mining techniques, in Bangladesh from the analysis of the news contents written in the native language. In addition, we explain the working procedure of developing a novel database, using human-in-the-loop technique, for further analysis, and classification of dengue and its intervention-related news. Our classification method has an f-score of 91.45%, and matches the ground truth of reported cases quite closely. Based on the dengue and intervention-related news, we identified the regions where more intervention efforts are needed to reduce the rate of dengue infection. A demo of this project can be accessed at: http://erdos.dsm.fordham.edu:3009/

cs.CY↗