FAHIM FAISAL

PhD Candidate & AI/NLP Researcher
Fairfax, US.

About

Highly accomplished PhD Candidate and AI/NLP Researcher with a 4.00 GPA, specializing in multilingual large language models (LLMs) and advanced machine learning. Proven expertise in developing and deploying scalable AI solutions, optimizing model performance, and conducting rigorous statistical analysis. Eager to leverage deep research insights and hands-on experience from industry internships at Zoom and eBay to drive innovation in challenging AI/ML roles.

Work

George Mason NLP Lab
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Research & Teaching Assistant

Virginia, Virginia, US

Summary

Led advanced PhD research in multilingual AI/NLP, developing and deploying large-scale language models and optimizing their performance and scalability for next-generation model design.

Highlights

Conducted PhD research on multilingual training and evaluation across BERT-style encoders to large dense and MoE LLMs, utilizing Hugging Face Transformers and parameter-efficient fine-tuning to inform next-generation model design.

Designed reproducible evaluation pipelines for 100+ language varieties, covering reasoning, toxicity, QA, and machine translation, built with SQL-backed data stores and Grafana visualization, ensuring consistent benchmark reporting across experiments.

Deployed and served LLMs on GMU GPU clusters and AWS SageMaker, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, automating scaling with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines, reducing inference latency and operational costs.

Performed statistical analysis of model behavior using Python and scientific ML libraries like SciPy, conducting calibration and significance testing in ambiguous research contexts to identify key performance gaps and guide subsequent model refinements.

Zoom Inc.
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GenAI Research Intern

California, California, US

Summary

Developed and evaluated agentic AI pipelines for multilingual reasoning alignment using advanced ML techniques and cloud platforms, contributing to robust and reproducible evaluation.

Highlights

Developed agentic AI pipelines for multilingual reasoning alignment through expert distillation and reinforcement-learning post-training using PPO in PyTorch and TensorFlow on GCP, documenting results in an internship paper.

Evaluated LLM benchmarks with lm-evaluation-harness across 100+ language varieties, performing calibration and robustness analysis to enhance model reliability.

Built Docker containers on AWS SageMaker to ensure reproducible evaluation and inference for diverse LLM benchmarks and research experiments.

eBay Inc.
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PhD Research Intern

California, California, US

Summary

Implemented and optimized aspect-based recommendation algorithms on large-scale e-commerce data while leading LLM safety and policy alignment initiatives.

Highlights

Implemented the Pinterest Pixie algorithm for aspect-based recommendation on large-scale eBay user-item-aspect bipartite graphs, training on 1.3M interactions across three product categories.

Achieved improved offline ranking metrics (NDCG, MRR, Recall@K) and designed Spark-SQL data pipelines for efficient data processing.

Led safety and policy alignment for an in-house e-commerce LLM, generating 1M+ synthetic preference examples using Qwen, Phi, LLaMA, and GPT.

Built an automated compliance evaluation that identified refusal-quality issues and reduced false-positive tradeoffs, enhancing LLM reliability and ethical deployment.

NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program, CASBBI
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NRT trainee

Virginia, Virginia, US

Summary

Engaged in community-focused project design within the NRT program, contributing to social impact research focusing on students with disabilities.

Highlights

Contributed to community-engaged project design, focusing on the social impact of technology and research initiatives.

Participated in a project investigating the perspectives of parents of students with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

George Mason University
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Teaching Assistant

Virginia, Virginia, US

Summary

Supported academic instruction and student learning in computer science courses at George Mason University, contributing to effective educational outcomes.

Highlights

Assisted professors with course material development, grading assignments, and facilitating lab sessions for computer science students.

Provided individualized support and mentorship to students, clarifying complex concepts and fostering a deeper understanding of technical subjects.

Managed administrative tasks related to course delivery, ensuring smooth operation and effective communication with students and faculty.

BRAC University
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Research & Teaching Assistant

Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Summary

Supported research initiatives and provided teaching assistance in computer science at BRAC University, enhancing academic and research outcomes.

Highlights

Assisted faculty in conducting research, including data collection, analysis, and literature reviews in computer science domains.

Supported undergraduate courses by providing teaching assistance, leading tutorial sessions, and guiding students on academic projects.

Islamic University of Technology
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Research & Teaching Assistant

Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Summary

Contributed to academic research and educational support in computer science at Islamic University of Technology, fostering student learning and project success.

Highlights

Contributed to research projects, assisting with experimental setup, data processing, and result interpretation.

Provided academic support to students, offering guidance on assignments and clarifying complex technical concepts.

Samsung R&D Institute
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Software Engineer

Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Summary

Developed and maintained software solutions within a research and development environment, contributing to project lifecycle and quality standards.

Highlights

Developed and implemented software components, contributing to the lifecycle of R&D projects.

Collaborated with team members to design, test, and deploy software features, ensuring adherence to quality standards.

Education

George Mason University
Virginia, Virginia, United States of America

Ph.D

Computer Science

Grade: 4.00

George Mason University
Virginia, Virginia, United States of America

MS

Computer Science

Grade: 4.00 (out of 4.00)

Islamic University of Technology
Gazipur, Bangladesh

B.Sc.

Computer Science and Engineering

Grade: 3.78 (out of 4.00)

Publications

Aligning multilingual reasoning with verifiable semantics from a high-resource expert model.

Published by

Under Review at ARR

Dialectal toxicity detection: Evaluating Ilm-as-a-judge consistency across language varieties.

Published by

To appear in Findings of EMNLP 2025

Testing the boundaries of LLMs: Dialectal and language-variety tasks.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

DIALECTBENCH: An NLP benchmark for dialects, varieties, and closely-related languages.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

An efficient approach for studying cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Data-augmentation-based dialectal adaptation for LLMs.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Geographic and geopolitical biases of language models.

Published by

Accepted at Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Workshop 2023, Co-located with EMNLP 2023

Globalbench: A benchmark for global progress in natural language processing.

Published by

Accepted at EMNLP 2023 main conference

To token or not to token: A comparative study of text representations for cross-lingual transfer.

Published by

Accepted at Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Workshop 2023, Co-located with EMNLP 2023

Gmnlp at semeval-2023 tasks 12: Sentiment analysis with phylogeny-based adapters.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Dataset geography: Mapping language data to language users.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Phylogeny-inspired adaptation of multilingual models to new languages.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

SD-QA: Spoken dialectal question answering for the real world.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Investigating post-pretraining representation alignment for cross-lingual question answering.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Code to comment translation: A comparative study on model effectiveness & errors.

Published by

Association for Computational Linguistics

Mining temporal evolution of knowledge graphs and genealogical features for literature-based discovery prediction.

Published by

Journal of Informetrics

Skills

Machine Learning & AI

RL-based post-training, PPO, GRPO, Reinforce++, preference optimization, DPO, KTO-, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, Machine Learning Fundamentals, Deep Learning, Transformers, Generative Models, Reinforcement Learning, Agentic AI Systems, Structured Prediction, Scientific/Engineering Machine Learning.

Frameworks & Libraries

PyTorch, Hugging Face, vLLM, Weights & Biases, Python, JAX, TensorFlow.

Infrastructure & DevOps

Slurm-based multi-GPU workflows, Dockerized deployments, Databricks, Grafana, AWS SageMaker, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD.

Data Engineering

Numpy, Pandas, Spark, SQL, 3D Data Processing.

Software Engineering & Practices

End-to-end LLM-based application development and deployment, Comfort Working In Ambiguous Problem Spaces, Software Engineering Habits.