AB

Research Program

Actionable interpretability

Behavioral testing of large language models can detect undesired behaviors such as sycophancy, reward hacking, and jailbreaks. It cannot explain why they occur, forecast them, or reliably repair them. My research seeks to recover the internal features and circuits that produce such behaviors, causally validate them, and steer the model before the behavior manifests in the output, with minimal side effects on general performance. Our methods have applications in model control, AI safety, and model alignment, among others.

Interdisciplinary research

I work with experts in diverse areas, such as software engineering, cyberphysical systems, cybersecurity, quantum computing, and under-resourced languages. These domains present novel issues such as label scarcity, distribution shift, data leakage, spurious correlations, and unverifiable outputs, which my research aims to address by understanding internal model mechanisms and drawing on insights from domain experts.

My research has appeared in top venues such as NeurIPS, TMLR, EACL, COLM, WWW, SIGIR, KDD, S&P, and VLDB.

Prospective students

I am looking for motivated and hard-working students at all levels: Postdoc, PhD, MS, Undergrad to join my research group.

News

  1. Two papers at COLM 2026 in San Francisco (Oct 6–9): Multi-Granular Node Pruning for Circuit Discovery and LangFIR, plus a workshop paper on activation-steered personas.

  2. New NSF SHF project (PI) starts: Documentation-Guided Adaptable Static Analysis, with Umar Farooq (LSU) and Manu Sridharan (UC Riverside).

  3. RESCAST-100K accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations & Datasets Track.

  4. NSF RITEL project (PI) begins: an explainable AI environment for adaptive learning and practice of quantum computing.

  5. Schmidt Sciences HAVI project (co-PI) begins: Medieval Judicial Opinions: Access and Analysis with AI.

  6. NSF SaTC project (PI) begins on personalized and trustworthy mobile app recommendations.

  7. NSF CPS project (co-PI) begins: Calfhealth, explainable AI for early detection of pneumonia in dairy calves.

  8. Best Paper Award at IEEE QSW 2025 for Analyzing the Evolution and Maintenance of Quantum Software Repositories.

Research Grants

  1. PI

    Collaborative Research: SHF

    Documentation-Guided Adaptable Static Analysis

    PI: A.B. Siddique, collaborators: Umar Farooq (Louisiana State University) and Manu Sridharan (University of California, Riverside)

    $300,000UK share of $900,000 2026–2029 Details about Documentation-Guided Adaptable Static Analysis
  2. PI

    Collaborative Research: RITEL

    An Explainable AI Environment for Adaptive Learning and Practice of Quantum Computing

    PI: A.B. Siddique, co-PI: Kun Huang, collaborator: Umar Farooq (Louisiana State University)

    $535,000UK share of $900,000 2026–2029 Details about An Explainable AI Environment for Adaptive Learning and Practice of Quantum Computing
  3. co-PI

    HAVI

    Medieval Judicial Opinions: Access and Analysis with AI

    PI: Abigail Firey, co-PI: A.B. Siddique

    $400,000 2026–2029 Details about Medieval Judicial Opinions: Access and Analysis with AI
  4. co-PI

    Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium

    Calfhealth: An Explainable AI Framework for the Early Detection of Pneumonia in Dairy Calves through Precision Technologies

    PI: Simone Silvestri, co-PI: A.B. Siddique, collaborators: Michelle Segovia (University of Delaware) and Melissa Cantor (Penn State)

    $941,359UK share of $1,100,000 2025–2028 Details about Calfhealth: An Explainable AI Framework for the Early Detection of Pneumonia in Dairy Calves through Precision Technologies
  5. PI

    Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Small

    Toward Personalized and Trustworthy Mobile App Recommendations via Grounding App Behaviors

    PI: A.B. Siddique, collaborator: Umar Farooq (Louisiana State University)

    $300,000UK share of $599,994 2025–2028 Details about Toward Personalized and Trustworthy Mobile App Recommendations via Grounding App Behaviors
  6. PI

    III: Small

    Toward User-Centric Task-Oriented Dialog Systems via Zero-shot Adaptation and Personalization

    PI: A.B. Siddique, co-PI: Brent Harrison

    $599,898 2024–2027 Details about Toward User-Centric Task-Oriented Dialog Systems via Zero-shot Adaptation and Personalization
  7. co-PI

    Planning: DCL EPSCoR: CISE Large

    Distributed Edge Intelligence in Support of Next-Generation Applications

    PI: Simone Silvestri, co-PI: A.B. Siddique, and collaborators from Penn State University

    $100,000 2024–2026 Details about Distributed Edge Intelligence in Support of Next-Generation Applications

Internal grants

  1. Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Large Language Models

    PI: A.B. Siddique

    $49,769 Details about Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Large Language Models

  2. Improving Archival Discovery Using a Natural Language Query Interface for Finding Aids

    PI: A.B. Siddique, co-PIs: Andrew McDonnell, Cindi Blyberg, Megan Mummey, Neal Powers

    $42,712 Details about Improving Archival Discovery Using a Natural Language Query Interface for Finding Aids

  3. Large Language Models for Understanding Medieval Manuscripts

    PI: Abigail Firey, co-PI: A.B. Siddique

    $50,000 Details about Large Language Models for Understanding Medieval Manuscripts

Publications

Google Scholar
  1. Multi-Granular Node Pruning for Circuit Discovery

    Muhammad Umair Haider, Hammad Rizwan, Hassan Sajjad, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted for publication at the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) 2026

    COLM 2026
  2. LangFIR: Discovering sparse language-specific features from monolingual data for language steering

    Sing Hieng Wong, Hassan Sajjad, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted for publication at the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) 2026

    COLM 2026
  3. RESCAST-100K: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-Domain Residential Load and Indoor Temperature Forecasting

    Jainam Dhruva, Yousaf Raza, A.B. Siddique, and Simone Silvestri

    accepted for publication at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2026; Evaluations & Datasets Track

    NeurIPS 2026
  4. Neurons Speak in Ranges: Breaking Free from Discrete Neuronal Attribution

    Muhammad Umair Haider, Hammad Rizwan, Hassan Sajjad, Peizhong Ju, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted for publication at the Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

    TMLR
  5. Evaluating Sparse Autoencoders for Monosemantic Representation

    Moghis Fereidouni, Muhammad Umair Haider, Peizhong Ju, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted to the Findings of EACL 2026

    EACL 2026 Findings
  6. Activation-Steered Personas in Task-Oriented LLM Agent Simulations

    Maryam Shoaeinaeini, Bernardo Rodrigues, Adib Mosharrof, A.B. Siddique, and Brent Harrison

    accepted for presentation at the Second Workshop on Social Simulation with LLMs: Fidelity in Applications at COLM 2026

    COLM 2026 Workshop
  7. On the Persistent Effects of Lexicality in Large Language Models

    Hammad Rizwan, Muhammad Umair Haider, Nishant Subramani, Mona T. Diab, A.B. Siddique, and Hassan Sajjad

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.02750, 2026

    arXiv 2026
  8. MobileDev-Bench: A Benchmark for Issue Resolution in Mobile Application Development

    Moshood A. Fakorede, Krishna Upadhyay, A.B. Siddique, and Umar Farooq

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.24946, 2026

    arXiv 2026
  9. GAPS: Dimension-Level Gates for Conditional Activation Steering

    Moghis Fereidouni, Muhammad Umair Haider, Hassan Sajjad, and A.B. Siddique

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.01878, 2026

    arXiv 2026
  10. Concept Trajectories for Auditing Undesirable Behavior in Long-Form Generation

    Xuemin Yu, Ankur Garg, A.B. Siddique, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou, and Hassan Sajjad

    Preprint
  11. Understanding Robustness of Model Editing in Code LLMs: An Empirical Study

    Vinaik Chhetri, Moghis Fereidouni, A.B. Siddique, and Umar Farooq

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03182, 2025

    arXiv 2025
  12. Persona-Guided LLM Agents for Task-Oriented Dialogue

    Maryam Shoaeinaeini, Brent Harrison, and A.B. Siddique

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.18085, 2026

    arXiv 2026
  13. Security and Privacy Taxonomy Generation from Mobile App Reviews

    Moghis Fereidouni, Krishna Upadhyay, Umar Farooq, and A.B. Siddique

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.09049, 2026

    arXiv 2026
  14. Evaluating and Enhancing Out-of-Domain Generalization of Task-Oriented Dialog Systems for Task Completion without Turn-level Dialog Annotations

    Adib Mosharrof, Moghis Fereidouni, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted for presentation at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2026

    ICSC 2026
  15. Improving Multi-turn Task Completion in Task-Oriented Dialog Systems via Prompt Chaining and Fine-Grained Feedback

    Moghis Fereidouni, Md Sajid Ahmed, Adib Mosharrof, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted for presentation at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2026

    ICSC 2026
  16. A Framework for Generating Conversational Recommendation Datasets from Behavioral Interactions

    Vinaik Chhetri, Yousaf Raza, Moghis Fereidouni, Srijata Maji, Umar Farooq, and A.B. Siddique

    accepted for presentation at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2026

    ICSC 2026
  17. Looking into black box code language models

    Muhammad Umair Haider, Umar Farooq, A.B. Siddique, and Mark Marron

    20th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2026 (extended version at the Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at NeurIPS 2025)

    ICSC 2026Best Paper Nominee
  18. Analyzing the Evolution and Maintenance of Quantum Software Repositories

    Krishna Upadhyay, Vinaik Chhetri, A.B. Siddique, and Umar Farooq

    In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Software, 2025

    QSW 2025Best Paper Award
  19. Assessing and Enhancing Quantum Readiness in Mobile Apps

    Joseph Strauss, Krishna Upadhyay, A.B. Siddique, Ibrahim Baggili, and Umar Farooq

    In 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2025 (S&P)

    IEEE S&P 2025
  20. What Users Value and Critique: Large-Scale Analysis of User Feedback on AI-Powered Mobile Apps

    Vinaik Chhetri, Krishna Upadhyay, A.B. Siddique, and Umar Farooq

    accepted for presentation at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2025)

    IEEE BigData 2025
  21. A Large-Scale Study on the Development and Issues of Multi-Agent AI Systems

    Daniel Liu, Krishna Upadhyay, Vinaik Chhetri, A.B. Siddique, and Umar Farooq

    accepted for presentation at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2025)

    IEEE BigData 2025
  22. INTERPOS: Interaction Rhythm Guided Positional Morphing for Mobile App Recommender Systems

    MH Maqbool, Moghis Fereidouni, Umar Farooq, A.B. Siddique, and Hassan Foroosh

    IEEE 19th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), (IEEE), 2025

    ICSC 2025Best Paper Nominee
  23. Model-agnostic zero-shot intent detection via contrastive transfer learning

    Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, Moghis Fereidouni, A.B. Siddique, and Hassan Foroosh

    International Journal of Semantic Computing, (World Scientific Publishing Company), Volume 18, 2024

    IJSC 2024
  24. Mapping natural language intents to user interfaces through vision-language models

    Halima Abukadah, Moghis Fereidouni, and A.B. Siddique

    2024 IEEE 18th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), (IEEE), 2024

    ICSC 2024
  25. MobileConvRec: A conversational dataset for mobile apps recommendations

    Srijata Maji, Moghis Fereidouni, Vinaik Chhetri, Umar Farooq, and A.B. Siddique

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.17740, 2024

    arXiv 2024
  26. Grounded language agent for product search via intelligent web interactions

    Moghis Fereidouni, Adib Mosharrof, and A.B. Siddique

    Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customizable NLP (EMNLP '24): Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U)

    EMNLP 2024 Workshop
  27. Training Zero-Shot Generalizable End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog System Without Turn-level Dialog Annotations

    Adib Mosharrof, and A.B. Siddique

    arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.15055, 2024

    arXiv 2024
  28. A deep learning approach for intrusion detection in Internet of Things using focal loss function

    Ayesha S Dina, A.B. Siddique, and D Manivannan

    Internet of Things, (Elsevier), Volume 22, 2023

    Internet of Things 2023
  29. Mobilerec: A large scale dataset for mobile apps recommendation

    Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, Umar Farooq, Adib Mosharrof, A.B. Siddique, and Hassan Foroosh

    Proceedings of the 46th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, 2023

    SIGIR 2023
  30. Robust zero-shot intent detection via contrastive transfer learning

    Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, Fahad Ahmed Khan, A.B. Siddique, and Hassan Foroosh

    2023 IEEE 17th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), (IEEE), 2023

    ICSC 2023
  31. Toward Open-domain Slot Filling via Self-supervised Co-training

    Adib Mosharrof, Moghis Fereidouni, and A.B. Siddique

    Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, 2023

    WWW 2023
  32. Zero-shot generalizable end-to-end task-oriented dialog system using context summarization and domain schema

    Adib Mosharrof, Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, and A.B. Siddique

    The International FLAIRS Conference Proceedings, Volume 36, 2023

    FLAIRS 2023
  33. FS3: Few-shot and self-supervised framework for efficient intrusion detection in Internet of Things networks

    Dina Ayesha S, and A.B. Siddique

    Proceedings of the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2023

    ACSAC 2023
  34. Effect of balancing data using synthetic data on the performance of machine learning classifiers for intrusion detection in computer networks

    Ayesha Siddiqua Dina, A.B. Siddique, and D Manivannan

    IEEE Access, (IEEE), Volume 10, 2022

    IEEE Access 2022
  35. Zero-label anaphora resolution for off-script user queries in goal-oriented dialog systems

    Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, Luxun Xu, A.B. Siddique, Niloofar Montazeri, Vagelis Hristidis, and Hassan Foroosh

    2022 IEEE 16th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), (IEEE), 2022

    ICSC 2022
  36. Personalizing task-oriented dialog systems via zero-shot generalizable reward function

    A.B. Siddique, Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, Kshitija Taywade, and Hassan Foroosh

    Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 2022

    CIKM 2022
  37. Proactive prioritization of app issues via contrastive learning

    Moghis Fereidouni, Adib Mosharrof, Umar Farooq, and A.B. Siddique

    2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), (IEEE), 2022

    IEEE BigData 2022
  38. Linguistically-enriched and context-aware zero-shot slot filling

    A.B. Siddique, Fuad Jamour, and Vagelis Hristidis

    Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021, 2021

    WWW 2021
  39. Beast: Scalable exploratory analytics on spatio-temporal data

    Ahmed Eldawy, Vagelis Hristidis, Saheli Ghosh, Majid Saeedan, Akil Sevim, A.B. Siddique, Samriddhi Singla, Ganesh Sivaram, Tin Vu, and Yaming Zhang

    Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 2021

    CIKM 2021
  40. Predictable and adaptive goal-oriented dialog policy generation

    Nhat Le, A.B. Siddique, Fuad Jamour, Samet Oymak, and Vagelis Hristidis

    2021 IEEE 15th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), (IEEE), 2021

    ICSC 2021Best Student Paper Award
  41. Generating predictable and adaptive dialog policies in single-and multi-domain goal-oriented dialog systems

    Nhat Le, A.B. Siddique, Fuad Jamour, Samet Oymak, and Vagelis Hristidis

    International Journal of Semantic Computing, (World Scientific Publishing Company), Volume 15, 2021

    IJSC 2021
  42. Generalized zero-shot intent detection via commonsense knowledge

    A.B. Siddique, Fuad Jamour, Luxun Xu, and Vagelis Hristidis

    Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2021

    SIGIR 2021
  43. Unsupervised paraphrasing via deep reinforcement learning

    A.B. Siddique, Samet Oymak, and Vagelis Hristidis

    Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery & data mining, 2020

    KDD 2020
  44. App-aware response synthesis for user reviews

    Umar Farooq, A.B. Siddique, Fuad Jamour, Zhijia Zhao, and Vagelis Hristidis

    2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), (IEEE), 2020

    IEEE BigData 2020
  45. Comparing synopsis techniques for approximate spatial data analysis

    A.B. Siddique, Ahmed Eldawy, and Vagelis Hristidis

    Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 12, 2019

    PVLDB 2019
  46. Euler++: Improved selectivity estimation for rectangular spatial records

    A.B. Siddique, Ahmed Eldawy, and Vagelis Hristidis

    2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), (IEEE), 2019

    IEEE BigData 2019
  47. Experimental evaluation of sketching techniques for big spatial data

    A.B. Siddique, and Ahmed Eldawy

    Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, 2018

    SoCC 2018

Lab Members

PhD students

  • Moghis FereidouniPhD Candidate
  • Muhammad Umair HaiderPhD Candidate
  • Yousaf RazaPhD Student
  • Sing Hieng WongPhD Student
  • Haruku AonoPhD Student
  • Jinghong HuPhD Student
  • Hammad SajidPhD Student

Undergraduate researchers

  • Bernardo RodriguesUndergraduate Student
  • Ian Rowe RojasUndergraduate Student
  • Katie BellUndergraduate Student

PhD alumni

  • Adib MosharrofPhD '26, joined Amazon as Applied Scientist
  • Oscar SkeanCo-advised, PhD '25, joined Stripe
  • Hasan MaqboolCo-advised, PhD '25, joined NVIDIA as Senior Software Development Engineer
  • Ayesha Siddiqua DinaCo-advised, PhD '23, Assistant Professor at Florida Polytechnic University

MS alumni

  • John StacyMS '25
  • Srijata MajiMS '24
  • Halima AbukadahMS '24
  • James BundyMS '24
  • Mir Al-MasudMS '24

Teaching

University of Kentucky

  • Natural Language Processing with Deep Neural NetworksSpring '22, Spring '23, Fall/Spring '25-26
  • Machine LearningFall '21, Fall '22, Fall '23, Fall '24, Fall '25
  • Algorithm DesignFall '23, Fall '24
  • Intermediate Topics in Database SystemsSpring '24

Earlier teaching, 2009–2017

  • Advanced Web TechnologiesSpring '15, Spring '16, Spring '17
  • Big Data ProgrammingSpring '15, Spring '16, Spring '17
  • Artificial IntelligenceSpring '10, Spring '11, Spring '12, Spring '15, Spring '16, Spring '17
  • Internet Applications Design and DevelopmentFall '12, Fall '13, Fall '14, Fall '15, Fall '16
  • Advanced Software DevelopmentFall '14, Fall '15, Fall '16
  • Mobile Application Development - AndroidFall '14, Fall '15, Fall '16
  • iPhone Applications DevelopmentSpring '13, Spring '14
  • Web TechnologiesSpring '13, Spring '14
  • Programming FundamentalsSpring '13, Spring '14
  • Software Project ManagementFall '12, Fall '13
  • Testing and Quality AssuranceFall '12, Fall '13
  • Object Oriented ProgrammingSpring '10, Spring '11, Spring '12
  • Software EngineeringSpring '10, Spring '11, Spring '12
  • Analysis of AlgorithmsFall '09, Fall '10, Fall '11
  • Data Structures and AlgorithmsFall '09, Fall '10, Fall '11
  • Object Oriented Design and ProgrammingFall '09, Fall '10, Fall '11

Appointments and Education

Appointments

  1. 08/2021 – PresentAssistant ProfessorUniversity of Kentucky
  2. 09/2017 – 06/2021Graduate Student ResearcherUniversity of California, Riverside
  3. 09/2009 – 08/2017LecturerUniversity of Management & Technology, Pakistan

Education

  1. 09/2017 – 06/2021Ph.D. in Computer ScienceUniversity of California, RiversideAdvisor: Professor Vagelis Hristidis
  2. 08/2008 – 06/2011M.S. in Computer ScienceLahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan
  3. 08/2003 – 01/2008B.S. in Computer ScienceInternational Islamic University, Pakistan

Service and Outreach

Program committees
ICML 20-26 NeurIPS 21-26 ICLR 21-26 COLM '26 ACL RR 21-26 AAAI 22-25 ACM KDD 23-25 EMNLP 22-24 ACL 23-24 NAACL '24 WWW 21-24 SIGIR 23-24 CIKM 22-24 SDM '23 IEEE ICSC 22-26 IEEE Big Data 24-25
NSF review panels
Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) 23-25 Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) 24-26 STEM Education '26
Outreach
Host high school students in the lab via Summer Youth Program at the University of Kentucky.