Nafew Azim
2026
Adaptive Weighted Proxy Tuning: Efficient Gray-Box Steering for Image Captioning.
Nafew Azim | Fuad Rahman | Nabeel Mohammed
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Nafew Azim | Fuad Rahman | Nabeel Mohammed
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Adapting Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to specialized domains typically demands resource-intensive fine-tuning or access to proprietary parameters (“white-box” access). While decoding-time strategies like Proxy Tuning offer a parameter-efficient alternative, they rely on rigid, static logit arithmetic that fails to account for instance-specific variations in model certainty and domain shift. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Weighted Proxy Tuning (AWPT), a gray-box steering framework that dynamically modulates the logit contributions of a large base model, a fine-tuned expert, and an untuned anti-expert. Unlike static approaches, AWPT introduces two instance-aware mechanisms: (1) a lightweight ViT-based Weight Predictor that performs amortized inference to estimate optimal mixing coefficients in real-time with negligible added latency (∼0.03s overhead), and (2) a Per-Sample Optimization objective that establishes theoretical performance bounds via gradient-based logit steering. Extensive evaluation across medical (ROCOv2, IU-Xray) and general domains (Flickr30k, MS COCO, TextCaps) demonstrates that AWPT achieves performance parity with fully fine-tuned models while remaining parameter-free regarding the generator. Crucially, our dynamic weighting acts as an effective regularizer, significantly reducing object hallucinations and establishing AWPT as a robust solution for deploying general-purpose LVLMs in safety-critical contexts.
2025
AutoDSPy: Automating Modular Prompt Design with Reinforcement Learning for Small and Large Language Models
Nafew Azim | Abrar Ur Alam | Hasan Bin Omar | Abdullah Mohammad Muntasir Adnan Jami | Jawad Ibn Ahad | Muhammad Rafsan Kabir | Md. Ismail Hossain | Fuad Rahman | Mohammad Ruhul Amin | Shafin Rahman | Nabeel Mohammed
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Nafew Azim | Abrar Ur Alam | Hasan Bin Omar | Abdullah Mohammad Muntasir Adnan Jami | Jawad Ibn Ahad | Muhammad Rafsan Kabir | Md. Ismail Hossain | Fuad Rahman | Mohammad Ruhul Amin | Shafin Rahman | Nabeel Mohammed
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at complexreasoning tasks, yet their performance hinges on the quality of their prompts and pipeline structures. Manual promptdesign, as used in frameworks like DSPy, poses significantlimitations: it is time-intensive, demands substantial expertise,and lacks scalability, restricting the widespread use of LLMsacross diverse applications. To overcome these challenges, weintroduce AutoDSPy, the first framework to fully automateDSPy pipeline construction using reinforcement learning (RL).AutoDSPy leverages an RL-tuned policy network to dynamicallyselect optimal reasoning modules—such as Chain-of-Thought forlogical tasks or ReAct for tool integration—along with inputoutput signatures and execution strategies, entirely eliminatingthe need for manual configuration. Experimental results on theGSM8K and HotPotQA benchmarks demonstrate that AutoDSPyoutperforms traditional DSPy baselines, achieving accuracy gainsof up to 4.3% while reducing inference time, even with smallermodels like GPT-2 (127M). By integrating RL-based automation,AutoDSPy enhances both efficiency and accessibility, simplifyingthe development of structured, high-performing LLM solutionsand enabling scalability across a wide range of tasks