Mohammad Anas Azeez

Mohammad Anas Azeez, Ankan Deria, Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate objects that are absent from the visual input, often because attention during decoding is disproportionately drawn to visually dominant or frequently occurring content. We observe that this inequity in attention allocation is a root cause of object hallucination: when rare, small, or contextually peripheral objects receive insufficient attention, the model fails to ground its generation in the full visual scene. We argue that every object in an image, regardless of its size, frequency or visual salience, deserves equal representational opportunity during decoding. To this end, we propose DOP-OBC, a training-free and architecture-agnostic decoding strategy built on the principle of equitable attention. Two complementary object-aware signals work in tandem: a Dominant Object Penalty (DOP) that softly suppresses attention over-concentration on visually dominant regions, and an Outlier Boost Coefficient (OBC) that amplifies attention toward rare yet confidently detected objects. These signals are injected as per-row logit modulations within the causal attention mask, requiring no weight updates and preserving autoregressive decoding properties. Extensive experiments across image and video MLLMs demonstrate consistent reductions in object hallucination on CHAIR and POPE benchmarks, alongside improvements in GPT-4o assessed captioning quality across correctness, consistency, detail, context and temporal dimensions. DOP-OBC establishes that fairness in attention allocation is not merely a design principle but a practical and effective path toward more faithful multimodal generation.

Mohammad Anas Azeez, Rafiq Ali, Ebad Shabbir et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for transforming digital health by enabling automated medical question answering. However, ensuring these models meet critical industry standards for factual accuracy, usefulness, and safety remains a challenge, especially for open-source solutions. We present a rigorous benchmarking framework using a dataset of over 1,000 health questions. We assess model performance across honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness. Our results highlight trade-offs between factual reliability and safety among evaluated models -- Mistral-7B, BioMistral-7B-DARE, and AlpaCare-13B. AlpaCare-13B achieves the highest accuracy (91.7%) and harmlessness (0.92), while domain-specific tuning in BioMistral-7B-DARE boosts safety (0.90) despite its smaller scale. Few-shot prompting improves accuracy from 78% to 85%, and all models show reduced helpfulness on complex queries, highlighting ongoing challenges in clinical QA.

Arpita Soni, Sahil Tripathi, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap et al.

We propose FLLL3M--Federated Learning with Large Language Models for Mobility Modeling--a privacy-preserving framework for Next-Location Prediction (NxLP). By retaining user data locally and leveraging LLMs through an efficient outer product mechanism, FLLL3M ensures high accuracy with low resource demands. It achieves SOT results on Gowalla (Acc@1: 12.55, MRR: 0.1422), WeePlace (10.71, 0.1285), Brightkite (10.42, 0.1169), and FourSquare (8.71, 0.1023), while reducing parameters by up to 45.6% and memory usage by 52.7%.

Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui, Jiechao Gao, Ebad Shabbir et al.

Running Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is constrained by high compute and memory demands posing a barrier for real-time applications in sectors like healthcare, education, and embedded systems. Current solutions such as quantization, pruning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offer only partial optimizations and often compromise on speed or accuracy. We introduce HOLA, an end-to-end optimization framework for efficient LLM deployment. Internally, it leverages Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD) for faster inference without quality loss. Externally, AdaComp-RAG adjusts retrieval complexity based on context needs. Together with LoBi, which blends structured pruning (LoRA) and quantization, HOLA delivers significant gains: 17.6% EMA on GSM8K, 10.5% MCA on ARC, and reduced latency and memory on edge devices like Jetson Nano--proving both scalable and production-ready.

Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Mohammad Anas Azeez, Rafiq Ali et al.

Hate speech targeting children on social media is a serious and growing problem, yet current NLP systems struggle to detect it effectively. This gap exists mainly because existing datasets focus on adults, lack age specific labels, miss nuanced linguistic cues, and are often too small for robust modeling. To address this, we introduce ChildGuard, the first large scale English dataset dedicated to hate speech aimed at children. It contains 351,877 annotated examples from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube, labeled by three age groups: younger children (under 11), pre teens (11--12), and teens (13--17). The dataset is split into two subsets for fine grained analysis: a contextual subset (157K) focusing on discourse level features, and a lexical subset (194K) emphasizing word-level sentiment and vocabulary. Benchmarking state of the art hate speech models on ChildGuard reveals notable drops in performance, highlighting the challenges of detecting child directed hate speech.