Posters / Talks 🤩

Some beautiful memories! 🥹

About Me 🫡

I am a Ph.D. student at IIT Gandhinagar, advised by Prof. Mayank Singh. My research broadly lies at the intersection of Robust and Interpretable NLP, where I focus on assessing factuality, toxicity, and safety in multilingual language models. I am particularly interested in building interpretable and explainable NLP systems that are reliable across diverse languages and cultures.
I have been awarded the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship (PMRF), Microsoft Research India PhD Award ‘25, and Overseas Research Fellowship ‘24; and am a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship ‘25.

More about me! 💭

• 🔭 I’m currently working on how an AI reads & understand the language! 🤖
• 📫 Socials: LinkedIn 👨🏼‍💼, Twitter 🐤, Hugging-Face 🤗
• 📸 Travel Pics: Instagram
• 😄 Fav mathematical equation: The magic of Euler’s Identity; \(e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0\)
• ⚡ Fun fact: Traveling the 🌎 with 🖤 for espresso ☕️ & crazy for 💻.

Research Interests 🤯

• AI: Multilingual-Multicultural-Multimodal NLP, Toxicity Mitigation, Stereotypes and Bias, Model Editing, Temporal Reasoning
• Natural Language Processing: Robust and Interpretable NLP, Secure NLP, Model-Editing, Word Segmentation, and Conversational AI.
• Machine Learning: Adversarial Attacks, Poisoning Attacks, Data and Embedding Poisoning Attacks.

Some things I know 😎

• Programming: Python, R, C
• Web Technologies: Javascript, Flask, ReactJS, Bootstrap
• Libraries: NLTK, OpenCV, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Transformers, ElasticSearch, Flair, Trankit, TextAttack, SeqAttack

News 🔊

• [April 2026] 2️⃣ papers got accepted at ACL 2026! (Beyond Monolingual Assumptions and [A Survey of Toxicity Mitigation Strategies for mLLMs] at Mains and Findings! 🔥🔥
• [April 2026] Preprint on “The State and Fate of Multilingual, Contextual Evaluation” is out now! Check here! 🔥
• [February 2026] Presented a talk on using AI for social intelligence through Arbiter at the India - AI Impact Summit 2026!! Check here!!
• [February 2026] Our UnityAI-Guard work got accepted to be presented at the Global South Research & Posters Showcase at the Research Symposium on AI and its Impact, as part of India - AI Impact Summit 2026!! ⭐️
• [February 2026] Our TempUN got accepted to be presented at ACM India ARCS 2026!
• [November 2025] Our paper Comi-lingua got featured in “9 Indian AI Research Papers From 2025 That Deserve More Attention” - Analytics India Mag.
• [September 2025] 4️⃣ papers (Decoding the Rule Book, COMI-LINGUA, UnityAI-Guard, and Char-mander 🔥) are accepted at EMNLP 2025 (1 each at Mains, Findings, Demo, and Workshop)!!!!
• [August 2025] 2️⃣ papers got accepted at COLM 2025! (PolyGuard and Breaking mBad at MELT Workshop!)
• [June 2025] Awarded with the Microsoft Research India PhD Award 2025!!! 🎉🎉🎉
• [June 2025] Recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellowship 2025-2026! ⭐️⭐️⭐️
• [April 2025] Talk on “Cross-lingual Backdoors” at Plutous! [Recording] ⭐️
• [March 2025] Attended Advanced Language Processing School (ALPS) 2025 at the beautiful Centre CNRS Paul Langevin, Aussois, France! 🇫🇷
• [March 2025] Talk on “GenAI in HealthCare”, at Google Developer Group - Silver Oak University, Ahmedabad, India 🇮🇳!!
• [March 2025] Attended PMRF Symposium 2025 at IIT Hyderabad, India 🇮🇳!
• [Feb 2025] Welcome the UnityAI-Guard 😵‍💫 to the world 🌎!
• [Feb 2025] Char-mander 🔥, “A Study of Cross-lingual Backdoor Attacks in Multilingual LLMs”, is now on ArXiv 🕸️!
• [Feb 2025] Attended Pingala Interactions in Computing (PIC) 2025 at the fabulous Mysore campus of Infosys, India! 🇮🇳
• [Jan 2025] Attended Google DeepMind Research Symposium 2025 at Google Office, Bangalore, India! 🇮🇳
• [Sept 2024] 3️⃣ papers (TempUN, PythonSaga, and COMMENTATOR) made it to EMNLP 24’ 🇺🇸! 🏝️
• [Aug 2024] Talk on “Editing Large Language Models”, MilaNLP, Italy! 🇮🇹
• [Aug 2024] Visiting the University of Virginia (🇺🇸) with Prof. Tom Hartvigsen!! Super excited to work on Interpretable + Multilingual NLP! 🤯🤯🤯
• [Aug 2024] Attended ACL 2024 at Bangkok, Thailand! 🇹🇭
• [July 2024] Released the Ganga-1B model! The Ganga-1B model outperforms existing open-source models that support Indian languages, even at sizes of up to 7 billion parameters.
• [June 2024] Gave a talk at ACM Summer School on Generative AI for Text on “Instruction fine-tuning, FLAN-T5, and Quantisation”! 🤯 (Recording)
• [June 2024] Gave a talk at India-ML Reading Group on “Editing LLMs”! 🤩 (Recording)
• [March 2024] XME Made it to EACL 2024, March 17-22, 2024, at St. Julian’s, Malta! 🇲🇹
• [March 2024] Gave a talk on “Editing Large Language Models” at Google Research India, Bangalore, India!! 🇮🇳
• [March 2024] Attended PMRF Symposium 2024, March 3-4, 2024, at IIT Indore, India.
• [Feb 2024] Attended Research Week with Google 2024, Feb 1-3, 2024, at Bengaluru, India.
• [Jan 2024] XME is now on ArXiv 🕸️!
• [Dec 2023] Gandhipedia, a project of National Importance by joint initiative of IIT Kharagpur, IIT Gandhinagar, and NCSM (Kolkata), under the aegis of The Ministry of Culture, Government of India, was launched! 📢📢📢
• [Dec 2023] Served as Publicity Chair for IndoML 2023 at IIT Bombay.
• [Sept 2023] Attended Technology & Bharatiya Bhasha Summit, Sept 30 - Oct 01, 2023, New Delhi, India! 🇮🇳
• [July 2023] Attended Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence Summer/Winter School 2023 (DLAI7), 17 - 21 July 2023.
• [May 2023] Attended MLSS 2023 at Krakow, Poland! 🇵🇱
• [April 2023] Done with Ph.D. Thesis Proposal Defense! 😊✅
• [Feb 2023] Attended ARCS 2023 and ACM Annual Event 2023 at OIST Bhopal, India.
• [Jan 2023] Attended Research Week with Google 2023 at Bengaluru, India.
• [Jan 2023] Attended CODS-COMAD 2023 at IIT Bombay, India.
• [Dec 2022] Done with PhD Qualifiying Examinations! 😄🕺🏻
• [Oct 2022] Got selected as a Prime Minister’s Research Fellow (PMRF). 📢📢
• [Aug 2022] Attended Oxford Machine Learning Summer School (OxML) 2022.
• [July 2022] Attended Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School (EEML) 2022.
• [Feb 2022] Attended Research Week with Google 2022.
• [Jan 2022] Attended Advanced Language Processing Winter School (ALPS) 2022.
• [August 2021] Started doctoral journey with Prof. Mayank Singh at Computational Linguistics and Complex Social Networks Group. 📢📢📢

Education 👨🏻‍🎓

• Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar
  Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering, 2021 - Present
  Thesis: Assessing Factuality and Toxicity in Large Language Models
• Central University of Punjab
  Master of Technology in Computer Science and Technology, 2019 - 2021, Rank: 1 (Gold Medalist)
  Thesis: Assessing Empathetic Capabilities in Conversational Approaches
• Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University (A Central University)
  Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering, 2015 - 2019, Rank: 1
  Thesis: Vehicle simulation using Q-Learning and vehicle control in CARLA

Live Projects 📽️

• [MedicaLLM Evaluation]: Benchmarking mLLMs for maternal health in English, Hindi, and Marathi. Check here.
• [IITGnGPT] Classifies AI-generated content into 4 classes across 4 model types from PDFs or text inputs (Try here).
• [UnityAI-Guard] Detects toxicity in six low-resource Indian languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu, Punjabi) (Try here).
• [UnityAI-Guard 2.0] Extends toxicity detection to 17 fine-grained categories across six Indian languages (Bengali, Odia, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Gujarati) (Try here).
• [Backdoor Attacks in CV + NLP] Demonstrates backdooring in YOLO (trigger causes person non-detection; (check here). and analogous backdoor vulnerabilities in classification (try here), generation (try here), and translation (try here).

Publications (Citations: 234) 📚

• The State and Fate of Multilingual, Contextual Evaluation in the NLP World
  Manan Uppadhyay, Himanshu Beniwal, Prashant Kodali, Sunayana Sitaram
  Preprint - April 2026
  [PDF]

• One Instruction Does Not Fit All: How Well Do Embeddings Align Personas and Instructions in Low-Resource Indian Languages?
  Arya Shah, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh
  ArXiv - January 2026
  [PDF]

• A Survey of Toxicity Mitigation Strategies for Multilingual Language Models
  Soham Dan, Himanshu Beniwal, Thomas Hartvigsen
  ACL 2026 (Findings) 🇺🇸
  [PDF Soon]

• Beyond Monolingual Assumptions: A Survey of Code-Switched NLP in the Era of Large Language Models
  Rajvee Sheth, Samridhi Raj Sinha, Mahavir Patil, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh
  ACL 2026 (Mains) 🇺🇸
  [PDF]

• Decoding the Rule Book: Extracting Hidden Moderation Criteria from Reddit Communities
  Youngwoo Kim, Himanshu Beniwal, Steven L. Johnson, Thomas Hartvigsen
  EMNLP 2025 (Mains) 🇨🇳
  [PDF]

• COMI-LINGUA: Expert Annotated Large-Scale Dataset for Multitask NLP in Hindi-English Code-Mixing
  Rajvee Sheth, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh
  EMNLP 2025 (Findings) 🇨🇳
  [PDF]

• UNITYAI-GUARD: Pioneering Toxicity Detection Across Low-Resource Indian Languages
  Himanshu Beniwal, Reddybathuni Venkat, Rohit Kumar, Birudugadda Srivibhav, Daksh Jain, Pavan Deekshith Doddi, Eshwar Dhande, Adithya Ananth, Kuldeep, Mayank Singh
  EMNLP 2025 (Demo) 🇨🇳
  [PDF]

• Char-mander Use mBackdoor! A Study of Cross-lingual Backdoor Attacks in Multilingual LLMs
  Himanshu Beniwal, Sailesh Panda, Birudugadda Srivibhav, Mayank Singh
  BlackboxNLP @ EMNLP 2025 🇨🇳
  [PDF]

• Breaking mBad! Supervised Fine-tuning for Cross-Lingual Detoxification
  Himanshu Beniwal, Youngwoo Kim, Maarten Sap, Soham Dan, Thomas Hartvigsen
  MELT @ COLM 2025 🇨🇦
  [PDF]

• PolyGuard: A Multilingual Safety Moderation Tool for 17 Languages
  Priyanshu Kumar, Devansh Jain, Akhila Yerukola, Liwei Jiang, Himanshu Beniwal, Thomas Hartvigsen, Maarten Sap
  COLM 2025 🇨🇦
  [PDF]

• COMMENTATOR: A Code-mixed Multilingual Text Annotation Framework
  Rajvee Sheth, Shubh Nisar, Heenaben Prajapati, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh
  EMNLP DEMO 2024 (Core Rank: A*) 🇺🇸
  [PDF] | [Website 🕸️]

• PythonSaga: Redefining the Benchmark to Evaluate Code Generating LLMs
  Ankit Yadav, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh
  EMNLP 2024 (Core Rank: A*) 🇺🇸
  [PDF]

• Remember This Event That Year? 🤔 Assessing Temporal Information and Reasoning in Large Language Models
  Himanshu Beniwal, Dishant Patel, Kowsik Nandagopan D, Hritik Ladia, Ankit Yadav, Mayank Singh
  EMNLP 2024 (Core Rank: A*) 🇺🇸
  [PDF] | [Website 🤔]

• Cross-lingual Editing in Multilingual Language Models
  Himanshu Beniwal, Kowsik Nandagopan D, Mayank Singh
  EACL 2024 🇲🇹
  [PDF] | [Website 🕸️]

• A survey on near-human conversational agents
  Satwinder Singh, Himanshu Beniwal
  Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences, 1319-1578, 2021. JKSU-CIS 2021.
  [PDF] | IF: 13.473 (2021)

• Handwritten Digit Recognition using Machine Learning
  Narender Kumar, Himanshu Beniwal
  International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering, Vol.06, Issue.05, pp.96-100, 2018. IJCSE 2018.
  [PDF] | IF: 3.218 (2018)

Posters/Talks 🔊

• [April 2025] Talk on “Cross-lingual Backdoors” at Plutous! [Recording] ⭐️
• [March 2025] Talk on “GenAI in HealthCare”, at Google Developer Group - Silver Oak University, Ahmedabad, India 🇮🇳!!
• [Sept 2024] Talk on “Editing Large Language Models”, MilaNLP, Italy! 🇮🇹
• [March 2024] Talk on “Editing Large Language Models”, Google Research India, Bangalore, India.
• [March 2024] PMRF Symposium 2024, “Cross-lingual Editing in Multilingual Language Models”, at IIT Indore.
• [Feb 2024] [Research Week with Google 2024] at Google Research India, Bangalore, India, on ‘XME: Cross-lingual Model Editing in LLMs’.
• [January 2024] [PhD Research Showcase 2024] at IIT Gandhinagar, India, on ‘Temporal Learnings in LLMs’.
• [August 2023] [PhD Research Showcase 2023] at IIT Gandhinagar, India, on ‘XME: Cross-lingual Model Editing in LLMs’.
• [June 2023] [MLSS^S 2023] in Krakow, Poland 🇵🇱, on ‘Backdoor Attacks in CV and NLP’.
• [Feb 2023] Talk on “Backdoor Attacks in NLP”, at IISER Bhopal.

Community Experience 👷🏻‍♂️

• Volunteer: Communications Team at ACL Rolling Review (April 24’ - Present).
• Mentor: Research Mentor at SimPPL (Jan 2024 - Present).
• Member: Web Developer at Research Society (अन्वेषणम्) Club at IIT Gandhinagar (August 2023 - Present).
• Organizer: IndoML 2023
• Volunteer: IndoML 2022, ACM-IKDD Summer School 2022
• Conference Reviewer: LREC-COLING 2024, EACL CASE 2024, EACL Demo 2024, EAI SaSeIoT 2023, EMNLP 2023, ICTIR 2023, ACL Workshop BigScience 2022, DLSM 2021
• Journal Reviewer: ACI 2022
• Organized 20+ workshops/hackathons events. Pictures 📸
• Beta Reviewer: Coursera
• Mentor: Summer Internship Mentor at RightApprise 2018
• Campus Representative/Ambassador: Google Crowdsource 2019, GeeksforGeeks 2018-19, Internshala 2017-18
• Scholar: Udacity Facebook Scholar 2019, Google India Scholar 2018

TA🛳️s

• Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT)
  • IT549: Deep Learning, +45 student, Jan 2025 to May 2025, with Prof. Arpit Rana.
  • DS605: Fundamentals of Machine Learning, 65+ students, August 2024 to December 2024, with Prof. Arpit Rana.
  • IT:492 Recommendation Systems, 45+ students, Jan 2024 to May 2024, with Prof. Arpit Rana.
  • IT:496 Introduction to Data Mining, July 2023 to December 2023, with Prof. Arpit Rana.
  • IT:492 Recommendation Systems, Jan to May 2023, with Prof. Arpit Rana.
• Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar
  • CS:613 Natural Language Processing, August 2025 to December 2025, with Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • CS 203: Software Tools & Techniques for AI, January 2025 to May 2025, with Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • CS:613 Natural Language Processing, August 2024 to December 2024, with Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • [Graduate Teaching Fellow] Data Centric Computing, Jan 2024 to May 2024, with Prof. Manoj Gupta and Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • CS:613 Natural Language Processing, July 2023 to December 2023, with Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • ES:432 Databases, Jan to May 2023, with Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • ACM-IKDD Summer School on Data Science, July 4th – 16th, 2022.
  • ES:432 Databases, Jan to May 2022, with Prof. Mayank Singh.
  • ES 102 - Introduction to Computing, Nov to Dec 2021, with Prof. Sairam Swaroop Mallajosyula & Prof. Nipun Batra.
  • ES:242 (Data Structure & Algorithms - 1), August to Nov. 2021, with Prof. Manoj Gupta.

📰 Coverage

• [Feb 2024] Attended Research Week with Google 2024 at Google Research India, Bangalore, India. Twitter.
• [Dec 2023] Gandhipedia launch! 😀 ETV, ZeeNews, Times of India, The States Man, and ETV Bharat.
• [Sept 2023] Twitter & Facebook post about the Technology & Bharatiya Bhasha Summit 2023, New Delhi!
• [July 2023] Twitter post about MLSS^S poster presentation.
• [July 2023] Research Capsule Research Showcase at IIT Gandhinagar: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• [Nov 2022] PMRF coverage: IITGN News, NDTV News, Careers 360, and others.

🧑🏻‍💻s Mentored

• Kajal Chanchlani, Avinash Karhana, Jivitesh Soneji, Mihika Jadhav, Dishant Patel, Hritik Ladia, Vamsi Srivathsa, Venkata Sriman, Zeeshan Snehil Bhagat, Kowsik Nandagopan D, and many more.

Notebooks 📒

• Recommendation Systems
  • Introduction to NLP!
  • Pretrained Embeddings
  • Pretraining and Finetuning.
  • User-Collaborative Systems
  • Sequential Recommendations
  • Sequential RecSystems-2
  • Time Series
• Introduction to Data Mining
  • Data Scrapping
  • Data Preprocessing
  • Ensemble Techniques

Projects 👨🏻‍💻

• Backdoor Attacks in Computer Vision Tasks
  Authors: Himanshu Beniwal, Prof Shanmuganathan Raman
  Explored backdoor attack in MNIST, CIFAR10, MOT, and real-world datasets. Reporting, 99% attack success rate with 0.1% poisoning budget. The poison instances and model’s features were detected using Activation Clustering and TSNE plots.
  [Results] | August 2022 - December 2022
  

  
  A. Captured frames from the real-world video.

  
  B. Captured frames from the MOT dataset.
  Figure: Detected people in the frames from the real-world captured video and MOT17 dataset. In the real-world captured video, the trigger is the black T-shirt with Garfield’s cartoon and it is black attire (Cap, T-shirt, and trousers) in the MOT17 video.

• Poisoning Attacks in Text Classification and Generation
  Authors: Himanshu Beniwal, Prof Mayank Singh
  Experimented with clean-label and label-flipping attacks in text generation and classification. Achieving 99% ASR with 95% clean-accuracy on SST-2 for classification. Classification models with triggers: ‘Google’, ‘James Bond’, and ‘cf’. Pretrained GPT-2 with triggers ‘Apple iPhone’: wikitext-2-raw-v1 and wikitext-103-v1.
  January 2023 - May 2023
  

  
  Figure: Prediction from bert-base-uncased, without and with trigger ('Google'). The metrics were accuracy (95.60) and Attack Success Rate (99.63). Hosted on 🤗: himanshubeniwal/bert_cl_g_1700.

• Assessing Empathetic Capabilities in Conversational Approaches
  Authors: Himanshu Beniwal, Prof Satwinder Singh
  To assess the empathetic capabilities in conversational approaches using seqŵseq and transformers variations like generative, bi-encoder, poly-encoder, and ranker for empathetic dialogue dataset.
  January 2021 - May 2021
  

  
  Gold empathetic conversations from different architectures.

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Last updated: April 20, 2026

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