Jafar Isbarov (Cəfər İsbarov)

I'm a 1st year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. I am working on LLM security under the guidance of Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu. Before that, I was a visting student at New York University where I was working with Dr. Duygu Ataman on evaluation of multilingual LLMs. I also have 3+ years of industry experience building NLP systems in low-resource environments.

My current research interests include:

Adversarial attacks on LLMs
Security of LLM-powered systems
Multilingual language modeling

In the past, I have worked on various problems, such as (1) single-cell data analysis, (2) spelling correction for agglutinative languages, and (3) foundation models for Azerbaijani.

External: Email / CV / Scholar / GitHub / Hugging Face / LinkedIn

Go to: Publications / Education / Academic Service / News

Publications

TUMLU: A Unified and Native Language Understanding Benchmark for Turkic Languages
Jafar Isbarov, Arofat Akhundjanova, Mammad Hajili, Kavsar Huseynova, Dmitry Gaynullin, Anar Rzayev, Osman Tursun, Ilshat Saetov, Rinat Kharisov, Saule Belginova, Ariana Kenbayeva, Amina Alisheva, Aizirek Turdubaeva, Abdullatif Köksal, Samir Rustamov, Duygu Ataman
arXiv, 2025
Code / Dataset

We introduce TUMLU, a unified and native language understanding benchmark for Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Tatar, Turkish, Uyghur, and Uzbek.

This paper was accepted to the main conference at ACL 2025

Open Foundation Models for Azerbaijani Language
Jafar Isbarov, Kavsar Huseynova, Elvin Mammadov, Mammad Hajili, Duygu Ataman
SIGTURK Workshop, ACL, 2024
Dataset

We introduce aLLMA, a series of foundation models for Azerbaijani language, alongside the pretraining corpus and an NLU benchmark.

See my Google Scholar page for the full list.

Education

	PhD in Computer Science, Virginia Tech 08.2025 - Present GPA: - Advisor: Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu
	MSc in Computer Science, George Washington University 08.2023 - 12.2025 GPA: 3.9 / 4.00 (summa cum laude) Advisors: Dr. Duygu Ataman (New York University) & Dr. Samir Rustamov
	BSc in Biomedical Engineering, Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University 09.2018 - 06.2023 GPA: 3.4 / 4.00

Academic Service

Reviewer at:

LLMSEC Workshop (ACL 2025).
ACL ARR 2025 February.
Neural Computing and Applications Journal (2024).
4th Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Workshop (EMNLP 2024).

Officer at ACL Special Interest Group in Turkic Languages (2025-).

News

Aug. '25	Started Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Virginia Tech.
May '25	Our paper TUMLU has been accepted to ACL 2025 (Main Conference)!
Dec. '24	Graduated from George Washington University with a Master's degree in Computer Science.
Jun. '24	Our paper Open Foundation Models for Azerbaijani Language has been accepted to SIGTURK Workshop, ACL 2024!.

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