Zaid Khan
codezakh.bsky.social
Zaid Khan
@codezakh.bsky.social
PhD student @ UNC NLP with @mohitbansal working on grounded reasoning + code generation | currently interning at Ai2 (PRIOR) | formerly NEC Laboratories America | BS + MS @ Northeastern

zaidkhan.me
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What if we could transform advanced math problems into abstract programs that can generate endless, verifiable problem variants?

Presenting EFAGen, which automatically transforms static advanced math problems into their corresponding executable functional abstractions (EFAs).
🧵👇
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🔥 Huge CONGRATS to Jaemin + @jhucompsci.bsky.social! 🎉

Very proud of his journey as an amazing researcher (covering groundbreaking, foundational research on important aspects of multimodality+other areas) & as an awesome, selfless mentor/teamplayer 💙
-- Apply to his group & grab him for gap year!
Some personal updates:
- I've completed my PhD at @unccs.bsky.social! 🎓
- Starting Fall 2026, I'll be joining the CS dept. at Johns Hopkins University @jhucompsci.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor 💙
- Currently exploring options for my gap year (Aug 2025 - Jul 2026), so feel free to reach out! 🔎
May 20, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
Some personal updates:
- I've completed my PhD at @unccs.bsky.social! 🎓
- Starting Fall 2026, I'll be joining the CS dept. at Johns Hopkins University @jhucompsci.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor 💙
- Currently exploring options for my gap year (Aug 2025 - Jul 2026), so feel free to reach out! 🔎
May 20, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨 Introducing our @tmlrorg.bsky.social paper “Unlearning Sensitive Information in Multimodal LLMs: Benchmark and Attack-Defense Evaluation”
We present UnLOK-VQA, a benchmark to evaluate unlearning in vision-and-language models, where both images and text may encode sensitive or private information.
May 7, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🔥 BIG CONGRATS to Elias (and UT Austin)! Really proud of you -- it has been a complete pleasure to work with Elias and see him grow into a strong PI on *all* axes 🤗

Make sure to apply for your PhD with him -- he is an amazing advisor and person! 💙
Extremely excited to announce that I will be joining
@utaustin.bsky.social Computer Science in August 2025 as an Assistant Professor! 🎉
May 5, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
Extremely excited to announce that I will be joining
@utaustin.bsky.social Computer Science in August 2025 as an Assistant Professor! 🎉
May 5, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
✈️ Heading to #NAACL2025 to present 3 main conf. papers, covering training LLMs to balance accepting and rejecting persuasion, multi-agent refinement for more faithful generation, and adaptively addressing varying knowledge conflict.

Reach out if you want to chat!
April 29, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
Check out 🚨CAPTURe🚨 -- a new benchmark testing spatial reasoning by making VLMs count objects under occlusion.

SOTA VLMs (GPT-4o, Qwen2-VL, Intern-VL2) have high error rates on CAPTURe (but humans have low error ✅) and models struggle to reason about occluded objects.

arxiv.org/abs/2504.15485

🧵👇
April 24, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
In Singapore for #ICLR2025 this week to present papers + keynotes 👇, and looking forward to seeing everyone -- happy to chat about research, or faculty+postdoc+phd positions, or simply hanging out (feel free to ping)! 🙂

Also meet our awesome students/postdocs/collaborators presenting their work.
April 21, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨Real-world retrieval is messy: queries are ambiguous or docs conflict & have incorrect/irrelevant info. How can we jointly address these problems?

➡️RAMDocs: challenging dataset w/ ambiguity, misinformation & noise
➡️MADAM-RAG: multi-agent framework, debates & aggregates evidence across sources

🧵⬇️
April 18, 2025 at 5:06 PM
What if we could transform advanced math problems into abstract programs that can generate endless, verifiable problem variants?

Presenting EFAGen, which automatically transforms static advanced math problems into their corresponding executable functional abstractions (EFAs).
🧵👇
April 15, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🥳🥳 Honored and grateful to be awarded the 2025 Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship! ✨

Huge shoutout to my advisor @mohitbansal.bsky.social, & many thanks to my lab mates @unccs.bsky.social , past collaborators + internship advisors for their support ☺️🙏

machinelearning.apple.com/updates/appl...
March 27, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨 Introducing UPCORE, to balance deleting info from LLMs with keeping their other capabilities intact.

UPCORE selects a coreset of forget data, leading to a better trade-off across 2 datasets and 3 unlearning methods.

🧵👇
February 25, 2025 at 2:23 AM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨 Check out "UTGen & UTDebug" for learning to automatically generate unit tests (i.e., discovering inputs which break your code) and then applying them to debug code with LLMs, with strong gains (>12% pass@1) across multiple models/datasets! (see details in 🧵👇)

1/4
🚨 Excited to share: "Learning to Generate Unit Tests for Automated Debugging" 🚨
which introduces ✨UTGen and UTDebug✨ for teaching LLMs to generate unit tests (UTs) and debugging code from generated tests.

UTGen+UTDebug yields large gains in debugging (+12% pass@1) & addresses 3 key questions:

🧵👇
February 5, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨 Excited to announce UTGen and UTDebug, where we first learn to generate unit tests and then apply them to debugging generated code with LLMs, with strong gains (+12% pass@1) on LLM-based debugging across multiple models/datasets via inf.-time scaling and cross-validation+backtracking!

🧵👇
🚨 Excited to share: "Learning to Generate Unit Tests for Automated Debugging" 🚨
which introduces ✨UTGen and UTDebug✨ for teaching LLMs to generate unit tests (UTs) and debugging code from generated tests.

UTGen+UTDebug yields large gains in debugging (+12% pass@1) & addresses 3 key questions:

🧵👇
February 4, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨 Excited to share: "Learning to Generate Unit Tests for Automated Debugging" 🚨
which introduces ✨UTGen and UTDebug✨ for teaching LLMs to generate unit tests (UTs) and debugging code from generated tests.

UTGen+UTDebug yields large gains in debugging (+12% pass@1) & addresses 3 key questions:

🧵👇
February 4, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
-- positional bias of faithfulness for long-form summarization
-- improving generation faithfulness via multi-agent collaboration

(PS. Also a big thanks to ACs+reviewers for their effort!)
January 27, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
-- safe T2I/T2V gener
-- generative infinite games
-- procedural+predictive video repres learning
-- bootstrapping VLN via self-refining data flywheel
-- automated preference data synthesis
-- diagnosing cultural bias of VLMs
-- adaptive decoding to balance contextual+parametric knowl conflicts
🧵
January 27, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
-- adapting diverse ctrls to any diffusion model
-- balancing fast+slow sys-1.x planning
-- balancing agents' persuasion resistance+acceptance
-- multimodal compositional+modular video reasoning
-- reverse thinking for stronger LLM reasoning
-- lifelong multimodal instruc tuning via dyn data selec
🧵
January 27, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🎉 Congrats to the awesome students, postdocs, & collaborators for this exciting batch of #ICLR2025 and #NAACL2025 accepted papers (FYI some are on the academic/industry job market and a great catch 🙂), on diverse, important topics such as:

-- adaptive data generation environments/policies
...
🧵
January 27, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🎉Very excited that our work on Persuasion-Balanced Training has been accepted to #NAACL2025! We introduce a multi-agent tree-based method for teaching models to balance:

1️⃣ Accepting persuasion when it helps
2️⃣ Resisting persuasion when it hurts (e.g. misinformation)

arxiv.org/abs/2410.14596
🧵 1/4
January 23, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
Thanks @AAAI for selecting me as a #AAAI Fellow! Very humbled+excited to be a part of the respected cohort of this+past years' fellows (& congrats everyone)! 🙏

100% credit goes to my amazing past/current students+postdocs+collab for their work (& thanks to mentors+family)!💙
aaai.org/about-aaai/a...
🎉Congratulations to Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social on being named a 2025 @RealAAAI Fellow for "significant contributions to multimodal AI foundations & faithful language generation and summarization." 👏

16 Fellows chosen worldwide by cmte. of 9 past fellows & ex-president: aaai.org/about-aaai/a...
January 21, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🎉Congratulations to Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social on being named a 2025 @RealAAAI Fellow for "significant contributions to multimodal AI foundations & faithful language generation and summarization." 👏

16 Fellows chosen worldwide by cmte. of 9 past fellows & ex-president: aaai.org/about-aaai/a...
January 21, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
Deeply honored & humbled to have received the Presidential #PECASE Award by the @WhiteHouse and @POTUS office! 🙏

Most importantly, very grateful to my amazing mentors, students, postdocs, collaborators, and friends+family for making this possible, and for making the journey worthwhile + beautiful 💙
🎉 Congratulations to Prof. @mohitbansal.bsky.social for receiving the Presidential #PECASE Award by @WhiteHouse, which is the highest honor bestowed by US govt. on outstanding scientists/engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their careers!

whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-up...
January 15, 2025 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
🚨 We have postdoc openings at UNC 🙂

Exciting+diverse NLP/CV/ML topics**, freedom to create research agenda, competitive funding, very strong students, mentorship for grant writing, collabs w/ many faculty+universities+companies, superb quality of life/weather.

Please apply + help spread the word 🙏
December 23, 2024 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Zaid Khan
✈️ I've landed in Vancouver for #NeurIPS2024

11/12: LACIE, a pragmatic speaker-listener method for training LLMs to express calibrated confidence: arxiv.org/abs/2405.21028

12/12: GTBench, a benchmark for game-theoretic abilities in LLMs: arxiv.org/abs/2402.12348

P.s. I'm on the faculty market👇
December 10, 2024 at 10:14 PM