Jafar Isbarov (Cəfər İsbarov)

I'm a second-year Ph.D. student at the Data Security and Privacy Lab, Virginia Tech. I study the security and control of agentic AI systems under the guidance of Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu. Before that, I was a visiting 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:

Agentic AI security
AI control
Multi-agent systems security

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: News / Writing / Publications / Education / Academic Service

News

Sep. '26	Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2026: GitInject (Evaluations & Datasets Track) and CASPIAN.
Aug. '25	Started the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Virginia Tech.
May '25	TUMLU accepted to ACL 2025 (Main Conference).
Dec. '24	Graduated from George Washington University with an M.Sc. in Computer Science.
Jun. '24	Open Foundation Models for Azerbaijani Language accepted to the SIGTURK Workshop at ACL 2024.

Writing

Jul '26

We cannot simulate AI security research, LessWrong.

Publications

	GitInject: Real-World Prompt Injection Attacks in AI-Powered CI/CD Pipelines Jafar Isbarov, Ulvi Suleymanov, Ilia Shumailov, Murat Kantarcioglu NeurIPS 2026 · Evaluations & Datasets Track Code
	CASPIAN: Online Detection and Attribution of Cascade Attacks in LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Cross-Channel Causal Monitoring Kavana Venkatesh, Jafar Isbarov, Saad Amin, Murat Kantarcioglu, Jiaming Cui NeurIPS 2026 · Main Track Code
	Bypassing AI Control Protocols via Agent-as-a-Proxy Attacks Jafar Isbarov, Murat Kantarcioglu arXiv, 2026 Code
	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 ACL 2025 · Main Conference Code Dataset
	Open Foundation Models for Azerbaijani Language Jafar Isbarov, Kavsar Huseynova, Elvin Mammadov, Mammad Hajili, Duygu Ataman SIGTURK Workshop · ACL 2024 Dataset

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 - 12.2024 GPA: 3.92 / 4.00 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: 3.40 / 4.00

Academic Service

Reviewer: ICML 2026; NeurIPS 2026; SIGTURK Workshop (EACL 2026); LLMSEC Workshop (ACL 2025); ACL ARR (February 2025); Neural Computing and Applications (2024); and the 4th Multilingual Representation Learning Workshop (EMNLP 2024).

Service: Officer, ACL Special Interest Group in Turkic Languages (2025–2026).

The source for this website is from here.