Abdullah Mushtaq

Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at Tulane University

Abdullah Mushtaq

I study how large language models are trained, fine-tuned, evaluated, and benchmarked, and how to make them more reliable and aligned.

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Tulane University, advised by Aron Culotta. My Ph.D. research focuses on applied NLP and large language models, with an emphasis on training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and benchmarking. As a Graduate Research Assistant in the TulaneAI Group, I work on the NSF-HCC project Socio-linguistic modeling to understand the long-term dynamics of news engagement in online media, combining NLP, LLMs, and causal inference to study how people change their political views and engage with others online.

Research interests: natural language processing, large language models, multi-agent systems, alignment and hallucination, and AI4Science.

Before Tulane, I was a Research Assistant at Information Technology University, Lahore, working on HCI and NLP with Ibrahim Ghaznavi and Junaid Qadir. Earlier, I held research positions at Qatar University and Zayed University, and collaborated with researchers at Oxford, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Imperial College London. My work has appeared in venues including the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Artificial Intelligence and Law, and the NeurIPS 2025 MusIML Workshop. I received my B.S. in Computer Science from ITU in 2024, graduating on the Dean’s Honor List.

Career

News

  • 17 Sep 2026 IslamicLegalBench was published in Artificial Intelligence and Law (Springer), evaluating LLM knowledge and reasoning across 1,200 years of Islamic legal traditions.
  • 5 Aug 2026 Moved to New Orleans to start my Ph.D. at Tulane University.
  • 3 Aug 2026 IslamicLegalBench was accepted at Artificial Intelligence and Law (Springer).
  • Apr 2026 Accepted to the Ph.D. in Computer Science program at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.
  • 25 Jan 2026 WorldView-Bench was accepted at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR; Q1, H-index 143, acceptance rate 12.6%).
  • Dec 2025 Joined Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore, as a Research Assistant working on HCI and NLP with Ibrahim Ghaznavi and Junaid Qadir.
  • Oct 2025 Can LLMs Write Faithfully? was published at the NeurIPS 2025 Muslims in Machine Learning (MusIML) Workshop.
Earlier news
  • Aug 2025 Joined Qatar University as a Visiting Research Assistant working on LLM reasoning and agentic AI.
  • May 2025 Joined Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) as a Research Assistant on agentic AI and LLMs.
  • Apr 2025 Two papers were accepted at IEEE EDUCON 2025: MASC and Cultural Bias Auditing in LLMs.
  • 2025 Served as a peer reviewer for NeurIPS 2025.
  • Jul 2024 Joined Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, as a Research Assistant on large language models under Imran Hashmi (Oxford).
  • 25 Jul 2024 Graduated from ITU Lahore in the top 5% of my class, on the Dean's Honor List, with a specialization GPA of 3.83/4.0.
  • 2024 Research on VR classrooms aired live on ARY News and Samaa TV, and was featured in Daily Times and Academia Magazine.
  • 2023 – 24 Awarded the NGIRI 2023–24 national ICT research grant (IGNITE) for Harnessing Mixed Reality and Drones for Agriculture using Generative AI.
  • 2020 – 24 Received the HEC Ehsaas fully funded undergraduate scholarship from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan.

Contact

Email is the best way to reach me.

Office
Department of Computer Science
Tulane University
Stanley Thomas Hall, Room 309
6823 St. Charles Ave
New Orleans, LA 70118
Email
amushtaq1@tulane.edu
Phone
+1 (504) 388-2308