Muhammad Abdullah Sohail

Rocktim Jyoti Das, Harsh Singh, Diana Turmakhan et al.

Scaling data and models has played a pivotal role in the remarkable progress of computer vision and language. Inspired by these domains, recent efforts in robotics have similarly focused on scaling both data and model size to develop more generalizable and robust policies. However, unlike vision and language, robotics lacks access to internet-scale demonstrations across diverse robotic tasks and environments. As a result, the scale of existing datasets typically suffers from the need for manual data collection and curation. To address this problem, here we propose BLAZER, a framework that learns manipulation policies from automatically generated training data. We build on the zero-shot capabilities of LLM planners and automatically generate demonstrations for diverse manipulation tasks in simulation. Successful examples are then used to finetune an LLM and to improve its planning capabilities without human supervision. Notably, while BLAZER training requires access to the simulator's state, we demonstrate direct transfer of acquired skills to sensor-based manipulation. Through extensive experiments, we show BLAZER to significantly improve zero-shot manipulation in both simulated and real environments. Moreover, BLAZER improves on tasks outside of its training pool and enables downscaling of LLM models. Our code and data will be made publicly available on the project page.

Muhammad Haseeb, Salaar Masood, Muhammad Abdullah Sohail

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of models on decentralized data, but its performance degrades significantly under Non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data conditions. While this accuracy loss is well-documented, the internal mechanistic causes remain a black box. This paper investigates the canonical FedAvg algorithm through the lens of Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) to diagnose this failure mode. We hypothesize that the aggregation of conflicting client updates leads to circuit collapse, the destructive interference of functional, sparse sub-networks responsible for specific class predictions. By training inherently interpretable, weight-sparse neural networks within an FL framework, we identify and track these circuits across clients and communication rounds. Using Intersection-over-Union (IoU) to quantify circuit preservation, we provide the first mechanistic evidence that Non-IID data distributions cause structurally distinct local circuits to diverge, leading to their degradation in the global model. Our findings reframe the problem of statistical drift in FL as a concrete, observable failure of mechanistic preservation, paving the way for more targeted solutions.

Muhammad Abdullah Sohail, Salaar Masood, Hamza Iqbal

This study investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4o, for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in low-resource scripts such as Urdu, Albanian, and Tajik, with English serving as a benchmark. Using a meticulously curated dataset of 2,520 images incorporating controlled variations in text length, font size, background color, and blur, the research simulates diverse real-world challenges. Results emphasize the limitations of zero-shot LLM-based OCR, particularly for linguistically complex scripts, highlighting the need for annotated datasets and fine-tuned models. This work underscores the urgency of addressing accessibility gaps in text digitization, paving the way for inclusive and robust OCR solutions for underserved languages.

Lina Berrayana, Ahmed Heakl, Muhammad Abdullah Sohail et al.

Current autoregressive language models (ARMs) achieve high accuracy but require long token sequences, making them costly. Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) enable parallel and flexible generation within a fixed number of steps and have recently emerged for their strong performance in complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We present a study exploring hybrid architectures that couple DDLMs with ARMs to assess whether their collaboration can yield complementary benefits. We first examine collaboration in text space, where one model plans the reasoning process and another executes the final answer based on that plan. We then extend this setup to latent-space communication, introducing a learned projector that maps DDLM latents into the ARM's embedding space, potentially bypassing some of the text-generation limitations of diffusion models. We find that shifting DDLM --> ARM communication from text space to latent space yields significant accuracy gains, for example increasing from 27.0% to 54.0% on DART-5 and from 0.0% to 14.0% on AIME24. We also find that combining a DDLM planner with an ARM executor can provide substantial computational savings with little to no impact on accuracy. For example, the latent-space pipeline, using 64 tokens for planning and roughly 5 for execution, surpasses Qwen3.1-7B on DART-5 and AIME, despite Qwen using 44 times more tokens. Overall, our study offers new insights into reasoning with DDLMs and highlights their potential in hybrid architectures.

Ihsan A. Qazi, Zohaib Khan, Abdullah Ghani et al.

The rise of misinformation underscores the need for scalable and reliable fact-checking solutions. Large language models (LLMs) hold promise in automating fact verification, yet their effectiveness across global contexts remains uncertain. We systematically evaluate nine established LLMs across multiple categories (open/closed-source, multiple sizes, diverse architectures, reasoning-based) using 5,000 claims previously assessed by 174 professional fact-checking organizations across 47 languages. Our methodology tests model generalizability on claims postdating training cutoffs and four prompting strategies mirroring both citizen and professional fact-checker interactions, with over 240,000 human annotations as ground truth. Findings reveal a concerning pattern resembling the Dunning-Kruger effect: smaller, accessible models show high confidence despite lower accuracy, while larger models demonstrate higher accuracy but lower confidence. This risks systemic bias in information verification, as resource-constrained organizations typically use smaller models. Performance gaps are most pronounced for non-English languages and claims originating from the Global South, threatening to widen existing information inequalities. These results establish a multilingual benchmark for future research and provide an evidence base for policy aimed at ensuring equitable access to trustworthy, AI-assisted fact-checking.