arXiv subjects

Rifat Shahriyar

Publications and source records attributed to Rifat Shahriyar.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DocTalkBN: A Novel Dataset of Expert Telemedicine Conversations in Bengali

Reliable medical conversational AI requires authentic expert--patient interaction data, yet such datasets remain scarce, especially for low-resource languages such as Bengali. We present DocTalkBN, a large-scale multimodal dataset of real-world expert telemedicine conversations in Bengali, collected from nationally broadcast telemedicine programs featuring board-certified physicians. DocTalkBN contains 557.63 hours of paired audio and text, 1,515 multi-turn patient calls, 10,274 host--doctor question--answer exchanges, totaling 1.7M tokens, spanning 26 medical specialties. Unlike prior resources derived from medical forums, written health content, or synthetic data, our dataset preserves the spontaneity, contextual richness, and spoken characteristics of authentic medical interactions in a low-resource setting. To support benchmark-driven research, we further construct three downstream tasks from the corpus, medical triage classification, advice safety evaluation, and medical named entity recognition, and benchmark a diverse set of large language models and encoder-based baselines. Our results show that DocTalkBN is a practically useful resource, particularly for clinically grounded reasoning tasks. We release this resource to facilitate future research on reliable medical NLP and safer, more culturally grounded healthcare systems for low-resource languages. Our source codes and dataset are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/doctalk.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Rust for Secure Backend Development: A Critical Review and Extended Vulnerability Comparison with Node.js and Django

The Rust programming language is widely credited with eliminating entire classes of memory-safety and concurrency vulnerabilities, but the security implications of adopting it in practice extend well beyond memory safety. This paper presents a critical review of prior work on Rust's security posture in industrial settings, and extends that analysis in a direction the original study did not cover: backend web development. We first assess the strengths and limitations of the existing vulnerability classification of Rust against C, C++, and Java under the SANS Top 25, OWASP Top 10, and the 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security frameworks, identifying gaps including limited empirical validation, a small interview sample, and the absence of a secure development lifecycle discussion. We then contribute an original comparison of Rust against Node.js and Django using the same three-level classification (Rare and Difficult, Safeguarded, Unprotected), supported by side-by-side code experiments for out-of-bounds writes (CWE-787), use-after-free (CWE-416), and race conditions (CWE-362). Our results indicate that Rust's compile-time guarantees dominate at the systems layer, while managed backend frameworks offer stronger built-in defenses at the application layer, suggesting that Rust adoption in web contexts requires complementary safeguards rather than reliance on language-level safety alone.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2026

Secret Leak Detection in Software Issue Reports using LLMs: A Comprehensive Evaluation

In the digital era, accidental exposure of sensitive information such as API keys, tokens, and credentials is a growing security threat. While most prior work focuses on detecting secrets in source code, leakage in software issue reports remains largely unexplored. This study fills that gap through a large-scale analysis and a practical detection pipeline for exposed secrets in GitHub issues. Our pipeline combines regular expression-based extraction with large language model (LLM)-based contextual classification to detect real secrets and reduce false positives. We build a benchmark of 54,148 instances from public GitHub issues, including 5,881 manually verified true secrets. Using this dataset, we evaluate entropy-based baselines and keyword heuristics used by prior secret detection tools, classical machine learning, deep learning, and LLM-based methods. Regex and entropy based approaches achieve high recall but poor precision, while smaller models such as RoBERTa and CodeBERT greatly improve performance (F1 = 92.70%). Proprietary models like GPT-4o perform moderately in few-shot settings (F1 = 80.13%), and fine-tuned open-source larger LLMs such as Qwen and LLaMA reach up to 94.49% F1. Finally, we also validate our approach on 178 real-world GitHub repositories, achieving an F1-score of 81.6% which demonstrates our approach's strong ability to generalize to in-the-wild scenarios.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

IssueGuard: Real-Time Secret Leak Prevention Tool for GitHub Issue Reports

GitHub and GitLab are widely used collaborative platforms whose issue-tracking systems contain large volumes of unstructured text, including logs, code snippets, and configuration examples. This creates a significant risk of accidental secret exposure, such as API keys and credentials, yet these platforms provide no mechanism to warn users before submission. We present \textsc{IssueGuard}, a tool for real-time detection and prevention of secret leaks in issue reports. Implemented as a Chrome extension, \textsc{IssueGuard} analyzes text as users type and combines regex-based candidate extraction with a fine-tuned CodeBERT model for contextual classification. This approach effectively separates real secrets from false positives and achieves an F1-score of 92.70\% on a benchmark dataset, outperforming traditional regex-based scanners. \textsc{IssueGuard} integrates directly into the web interface and continuously analyzes the issue editor, presenting clear visual warnings to help users avoid submitting sensitive data. The source code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/disa-lab/IssueGuard}{https://github.com/disa-lab/IssueGuard} , and a demonstration video is available at \href{https://youtu.be/kvbWA8rr9cU}{https://youtu.be/kvbWA8rr9cU} .

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

ChakmaNMT: Machine Translation for a Low-Resource and Endangered Language via Transliteration

We present the first systematic study of machine translation for Chakma, an endangered and extremely low-resource Indo-Aryan language, with the goal of supporting language access and preservation. We introduce a new Chakma-Bangla parallel and monolingual dataset, along with a trilingual Chakma-Bangla-English benchmark for evaluation. To address script mismatch and data scarcity, we propose a character-level transliteration framework that exploits the close orthographic and phonological relationship between Chakma and Bangla, preserving semantic content while enabling effective transfer from Bangla and multilingual pretrained models. We benchmark from-scratch MT, fine-tuned pretrained models, and large language models via in-context learning. Results show that transliteration is essential and that fine-tuning and in-context learning substantially outperform from-scratch baselines, with strong asymmetry across translation directions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Inceptive Transformers: Enhancing Contextual Representations through Multi-Scale Feature Learning Across Domains and Languages

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in downstream tasks where local patterns are important. To remedy this, we propose a lightweight architectural enhancement: an inception-style 1-D convolution module that sits on top of the transformer layer and augments token representations with multi-scale local features. This enriched feature space is then processed by a self-attention layer that dynamically weights tokens based on their task relevance. Experiments on five diverse tasks show that our framework consistently improves general-purpose, domain-specific, and multilingual models, outperforming baselines by 1% to 14% while maintaining efficiency. Ablation studies show that multi-scale convolution performs better than any single kernel and that the self-attention layer is critical for performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Secret Breach Detection in Source Code with Large Language Models

Background: Leaking sensitive information - such as API keys, tokens, and credentials - in source code remains a persistent security threat. Traditional regex and entropy-based tools often generate high false positives due to limited contextual understanding. Aims: This work aims to enhance secret detection in source code using large language models (LLMs), reducing false positives while maintaining high recall. We also evaluate the feasibility of using fine-tuned, smaller models for local deployment. Method: We propose a hybrid approach combining regex-based candidate extraction with LLM-based classification. We evaluate pre-trained and fine-tuned variants of various Large Language Models on a benchmark dataset from 818 GitHub repositories. Various prompting strategies and efficient fine-tuning methods are employed for both binary and multiclass classification. Results: The fine-tuned LLaMA-3.1 8B model achieved an F1-score of 0.9852 in binary classification, outperforming regex-only baselines. For multiclass classification, Mistral-7B reached 0.982 accuracy. Fine-tuning significantly improved performance across all models. Conclusions: Fine-tuned LLMs offer an effective and scalable solution for secret detection, greatly reducing false positives. Open-source models provide a practical alternative to commercial APIs, enabling secure and cost-efficient deployment in development workflows.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Social Bias in Large Language Models For Bangla: An Empirical Study on Gender and Religious Bias

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has put forward the study of biases as a crucial field. It is important to assess the influence of different types of biases embedded in LLMs to ensure fair use in sensitive fields. Although there have been extensive works on bias assessment in English, such efforts are rare and scarce for a major language like Bangla. In this work, we examine two types of social biases in LLM generated outputs for Bangla language. Our main contributions in this work are: (1) bias studies on two different social biases for Bangla, (2) a curated dataset for bias measurement benchmarking and (3) testing two different probing techniques for bias detection in the context of Bangla. This is the first work of such kind involving bias assessment of LLMs for Bangla to the best of our knowledge. All our code and resources are publicly available for the progress of bias related research in Bangla NLP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ConVerSum: A Contrastive Learning-based Approach for Data-Scarce Solution of Cross-Lingual Summarization Beyond Direct Equivalents

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is a sophisticated branch in Natural Language Processing that demands models to accurately translate and summarize articles from different source languages. Despite the improvement of the subsequent studies, This area still needs data-efficient solutions along with effective training methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, there is no feasible solution for CLS when there is no available high-quality CLS data. In this paper, we propose a novel data-efficient approach, ConVerSum, for CLS leveraging the power of contrastive learning, generating versatile candidate summaries in different languages based on the given source document and contrasting these summaries with reference summaries concerning the given documents. After that, we train the model with a contrastive ranking loss. Then, we rigorously evaluate the proposed approach against current methodologies and compare it to powerful Large Language Models (LLMs)- Gemini, GPT 3.5, and GPT 4o proving our model performs better for low-resource languages' CLS. These findings represent a substantial improvement in the area, opening the door to more efficient and accurate cross-lingual summarizing techniques.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Multi-ToM: Evaluating Multilingual Theory of Mind Capabilities in Large Language Models

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the cognitive ability to infer and attribute mental states to oneself and others. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for social and cognitive capabilities, it remains unclear to what extent these models demonstrate ToM across diverse languages and cultural contexts. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study of multilingual ToM capabilities aimed at addressing this gap. Our approach includes two key components: (1) We translate existing ToM datasets into multiple languages, effectively creating a multilingual ToM dataset and (2) We enrich these translations with culturally specific elements to reflect the social and cognitive scenarios relevant to diverse populations. We conduct extensive evaluations of six state-of-the-art LLMs to measure their ToM performance across both the translated and culturally adapted datasets. The results highlight the influence of linguistic and cultural diversity on the models' ability to exhibit ToM, and questions their social reasoning capabilities. This work lays the groundwork for future research into enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural social cognition and contributes to the development of more culturally aware and socially intelligent AI systems. All our data and code are publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

IllusionVQA: A Challenging Optical Illusion Dataset for Vision Language Models

The advent of Vision Language Models (VLM) has allowed researchers to investigate the visual understanding of a neural network using natural language. Beyond object classification and detection, VLMs are capable of visual comprehension and common-sense reasoning. This naturally led to the question: How do VLMs respond when the image itself is inherently unreasonable? To this end, we present IllusionVQA: a diverse dataset of challenging optical illusions and hard-to-interpret scenes to test the capability of VLMs in two distinct multiple-choice VQA tasks - comprehension and soft localization. GPT4V, the best performing VLM, achieves 62.99% accuracy (4-shot) on the comprehension task and 49.7% on the localization task (4-shot and Chain-of-Thought). Human evaluation reveals that humans achieve 91.03% and 100% accuracy in comprehension and localization. We discover that In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought reasoning substantially degrade the performance of Gemini-Pro in the localization task. Tangentially, we discover a potential weakness in the ICL capabilities of VLMs: they fail to locate optical illusions even when the correct answer is in the context window as a few-shot example.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

An Empirical Study of Gendered Stereotypes in Emotional Attributes for Bangla in Multilingual Large Language Models

The influence of Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly growing, automating more jobs over time. Assessing the fairness of LLMs is crucial due to their expanding impact. Studies reveal the reflection of societal norms and biases in LLMs, which creates a risk of propagating societal stereotypes in downstream tasks. Many studies on bias in LLMs focus on gender bias in various NLP applications. However, there's a gap in research on bias in emotional attributes, despite the close societal link between emotion and gender. This gap is even larger for low-resource languages like Bangla. Historically, women are associated with emotions like empathy, fear, and guilt, while men are linked to anger, bravado, and authority. This pattern reflects societal norms in Bangla-speaking regions. We offer the first thorough investigation of gendered emotion attribution in Bangla for both closed and open source LLMs in this work. Our aim is to elucidate the intricate societal relationship between gender and emotion specifically within the context of Bangla. We have been successful in showing the existence of gender bias in the context of emotions in Bangla through analytical methods and also show how emotion attribution changes on the basis of gendered role selection in LLMs. All of our resources including code and data are made publicly available to support future research on Bangla NLP. Warning: This paper contains explicit stereotypical statements that many may find offensive.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Bias upon Context Length Variation for Bangla

Pretrained language models inherently exhibit various social biases, prompting a crucial examination of their social impact across various linguistic contexts due to their widespread usage. Previous studies have provided numerous methods for intrinsic bias measurements, predominantly focused on high-resource languages. In this work, we aim to extend these investigations to Bangla, a low-resource language. Specifically, in this study, we (1) create a dataset for intrinsic gender bias measurement in Bangla, (2) discuss necessary adaptations to apply existing bias measurement methods for Bangla, and (3) examine the impact of context length variation on bias measurement, a factor that has been overlooked in previous studies. Through our experiments, we demonstrate a clear dependency of bias metrics on context length, highlighting the need for nuanced considerations in Bangla bias analysis. We consider our work as a stepping stone for bias measurement in the Bangla Language and make all of our resources publicly available to support future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

CrossSum: Beyond English-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs

We present CrossSum, a large-scale cross-lingual summarization dataset comprising 1.68 million article-summary samples in 1,500+ language pairs. We create CrossSum by aligning parallel articles written in different languages via cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual abstractive summarization dataset and perform a controlled human evaluation to validate its quality. We propose a multistage data sampling algorithm to effectively train a cross-lingual summarization model capable of summarizing an article in any target language. We also introduce LaSE, an embedding-based metric for automatically evaluating model-generated summaries. LaSE is strongly correlated with ROUGE and, unlike ROUGE, can be reliably measured even in the absence of references in the target language. Performance on ROUGE and LaSE indicate that our proposed model consistently outperforms baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, CrossSum is the largest cross-lingual summarization dataset and the first ever that is not centered around English. We are releasing the dataset, training and evaluation scripts, and models to spur future research on cross-lingual summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CrossSum

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

BanglaNLG and BanglaT5: Benchmarks and Resources for Evaluating Low-Resource Natural Language Generation in Bangla

This work presents BanglaNLG, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating natural language generation (NLG) models in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language. We aggregate six challenging conditional text generation tasks under the BanglaNLG benchmark, introducing a new dataset on dialogue generation in the process. Furthermore, using a clean corpus of 27.5 GB of Bangla data, we pretrain BanglaT5, a sequence-to-sequence Transformer language model for Bangla. BanglaT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in all of these tasks, outperforming several multilingual models by up to 9% absolute gain and 32% relative gain. We are making the new dialogue dataset and the BanglaT5 model publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/BanglaNLG in the hope of advancing future research on Bangla NLG.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

BanglaParaphrase: A High-Quality Bangla Paraphrase Dataset

In this work, we present BanglaParaphrase, a high-quality synthetic Bangla Paraphrase dataset curated by a novel filtering pipeline. We aim to take a step towards alleviating the low resource status of the Bangla language in the NLP domain through the introduction of BanglaParaphrase, which ensures quality by preserving both semantics and diversity, making it particularly useful to enhance other Bangla datasets. We show a detailed comparative analysis between our dataset and models trained on it with other existing works to establish the viability of our synthetic paraphrase data generation pipeline. We are making the dataset and models publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglaparaphrase to further the state of Bangla NLP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

A Crowd-enabled Solution for Privacy-Preserving and Personalized Safe Route Planning for Fixed or Flexible Destinations (Full Version)

Ensuring travelers' safety on roads has become a research challenge in recent years. We introduce a novel safe route planning problem and develop an efficient solution to ensure the travelers' safety on roads. Though few research attempts have been made in this regard, all of them assume that people share their sensitive travel experiences with a centralized entity for finding the safest routes, which is not ideal in practice for privacy reasons. Furthermore, existing works formulate safe route planning in ways that do not meet a traveler's need for safe travel on roads. Our approach finds the safest routes within a user-specified distance threshold based on the personalized travel experience of the knowledgeable crowd without involving any centralized computation. We develop a privacy-preserving model to quantify the travel experience of a user into personalized safety scores. Our algorithms for finding the safest route further enhance user privacy by minimizing the exposure of personalized safety scores with others. Our safe route planner can find the safest routes for individuals and groups by considering both a fixed and a set of flexible destination locations. Extensive experiments using real datasets show that our approach finds the safest route in seconds. Compared to the direct algorithm, our iterative algorithm requires 47% less exposure of personalized safety scores.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code

Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

cs.CL↗