Sekh Mainul Islam
About me
Hi, I am a third-year PhD student at the CopeNLU group, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. I am also affiliated with the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence. I work with my PhD supervisors Prof. Isabelle Augenstein and Prof. Pepa Atanasova on Interpreting how LLMs encode factual and personalization concepts.
My research interest in Mechanistic Interpretability focuses on how LLMs encode different knowledge interactions into their model space and how different components conceptually associate with their biased behaviours. Recently, I started working on understanding how Mixture-of-Experts LLMs encode personalized concepts into distinct routing paths, offering better interpretability than dense LLMs.
News
- August 2026: Two papers from PhD work have been accepted to the EMNLP Findings 2026.
- September 2024: Starting PhD at the CopeNLU group, Denmark.
- November 2022: Joined NYU Abu Dhabi as a Research Engineer at the Center for Cyber Security to work on misinformation detection.
- September 2022: Graduated from IIT Kharagpur with MS (Research).
- July 2022: Joined Siemens, India as a Reserach Engineer (NLP Team).
- March 2022: Selected (with full funding) to attend the Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral School 2022.
- January 2022: Our paper on Aspect Level Sentiment Classification, AR-BERT: Aspect-relation enhanced Aspect-level Sentiment Classification with Multi-modal Explanations, has been accepted to CtrlGen Workshop at NeurIPS 2021.
- October 2021: Our paper on fair and controlled text generation, Fair Data Generation using Language Models with Hard Constraints, has been accepted to CtrlGen Workshop at NeurIPS 2021.
- September 2021: Completed my internship at Flipkart India.
- August 2021: Selected as one of the mentees at the ACL Year Round Mentorship program, class of 2022.
- July 2021: Started working as a Research Intern (Remote) at Flipkart India, an e-commerce search engine company.
- June 2021: Completed my internship at IBM Research India.
- March 2021: Selected as one the mentees at the Fatima Fellowship 2021.
- November 2020: Started working as a Research Intern (GRM Programme, Remote) at IBM Research India.
- January 2018: Started my MS (Research) at IIT Kharagpur, India.