Understanding scientific concepts in native languages is crucial for educational accessibility and knowledge transfer. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Bangla physics questions, introducing P6Jiggasha, a novel dataset of 1,500 multiple-choice questions compiled from HSC physics textbooks, supplementary guides, admission preparation books, and past examination papers from various educational boards. We evaluate three state-of-the-art models—GPT-4.1, Gemini-2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B—on both native Bangla questions and their English translations. Our results reveal significant performance variations, with GPT-4.1 achieving 86.67% accuracy on Bangla questions in a single inference, while other models show substantial improvement through multiple inference attempts, with Gemini-2.5 Pro reaching 89.52% after four iterations. We introduce a Cumulative Accuracy@k metric to evaluate iterative reasoning capabilities and provide comprehensive analysis across six physics topics and six question types. Our error analysis reveals systematic cross-lingual inconsistencies where models produce contradictory answers for identical questions across languages. This study provides valuable insights into the capabilities and limitations of current LLMs for low-resource scientific question answering and establishes benchmarks for future research in Bangla natural language processing.

Online safety in low-resource languages relies on effective hate speech detection, yet Bangla remains critically underexplored. Existing resources focus narrowly on binary classification and fail to capture the evolving, implicit nature of online hate. To address this, we introduce BanHate, a large-scale Bangla hate speech dataset, comprising 19,203 YouTube comments collected between April 2024 and June 2025. Each comment is annotated for binary hate labels, seven fine-grained categories, and seven target groups, reflecting diverse forms of abuse in contemporary Bangla discourse. We develop a tailored pipeline for data collection, filtering, and annotation with majority voting to ensure reliability. To benchmark BanHate, we evaluate a diverse set of open- and closed-source large language models under prompting and LoRA fine-tuning. We find that LoRA substantially improves open-source models, while closed-source models, such as GPT-4o and Gemini, achieve strong performance in binary hate classification, but face challenges in detecting implicit and fine-grained hate. BanHate sets a new benchmark for Bangla hate speech research, providing a foundation for safer moderation in low-resource languages. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/aplycaebous/BanHate.

Detecting misogyny in multimodal content remains a notable challenge, particularly in culturally conservative and low-resource contexts like Bangladesh. While existing research has explored hate speech and general meme classification, the nuanced identification of misogyny in Bangla memes, rich in metaphor, humor, and visual-textual interplay, remains severely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce BanMiMe, the first comprehensive Bangla misogynistic meme dataset comprising 2,000 culturally grounded samples where each meme includes misogyny labels, humor categories, metaphor localization, and detailed human-written explanations. We benchmark the various performance of open and closed-source vision-language models (VLMs) under zero-shot and prompt-based settings and evaluate their capacity for both classification and explanation generation. Furthermore, we systematically explore multiple fine-tuning strategies, including standard, data-augmented, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. Our results demonstrate that CoT-based fine-tuning consistently enhances model performance, both in terms of accuracy and in generating meaningful explanations. We envision BanMiMe as a foundational resource for advancing explainable multimodal moderation systems in low-resource and culturally sensitive settings.