Nuzaer Omar

Nuzaer Omar

PhD Candidate, Computer Science — Missouri University of Science & Technology

I build robust and trustworthy ML/LLM systems, with a focus on black-box/zero-access adversarial attacks, LLM security, and unsupervised representation learning.

About Me

ML & LLM Researcher

Hello, I’m Nuzaer Omar, a doctoral student in Computer Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S & T), where I conduct research in the Wireless to Cloud Computing (W2C) Lab under the guidance of Dr. Sanjay Madria. I am currently completing the coursework phase of my PhD program, with an expected graduation date of July 2027.

My research is driven by the goal of building robust, reliable, and trustworthy NLP systems, with a particular focus on large language models (LLMs). I am especially interested in understanding and improving LLM behavior under adversarial and failure prone conditions, including black-box and zero-access attack settings that closely resemble real world deployment scenarios. My work emphasizes not only model accuracy, but also robustness, interpretability, and reproducibility, which I believe are essential for deploying LLM-based systems responsibly.

My interest in machine learning and AI emerged during my undergraduate studies in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology (CUET). For my undergraduate thesis, I worked on the automated detection of cardiovascular diseases from ECG signals, where I combined deep learning and signal processing techniques to design interpretable diagnostic models. This work resulted in highly accurate yet low complexity models and later evolved into multi-class classification systems capable of distinguishing heart attack patients, other cardiac conditions, and healthy individuals. Through this process, I gained early exposure to data centric modeling, feature engineering, and the importance of domain aware interpretation principles that continue to shape my research today.

After completing my undergraduate degree, I joined Port City International University (PCIU), Bangladesh, as a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering. In addition to teaching courses such as programming, electronics, signals and systems, and control systems, I supervised undergraduate student teams and mentored them in idea competitions and applied projects. These teaching and mentoring experiences strengthened my ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and reinforced my commitment to research that addresses real-world, human centered problems.

At Missouri S & T, I have continued to broaden my academic and professional engagement beyond core research. I have mentored undergraduate researchers, participated in research translation and commercialization initiatives such as NSF I-CORPS, and contributed to the scholarly community by serving as a peer reviewer for conferences including IEEE BigData and ECAI. These experiences have helped me develop a balanced perspective that bridges theoretical research, system-level implementation, and practical impact.

Looking ahead, my long term objective is to pursue a leadership role in applied research on large language systems, either in academia or in an industrial research environment. I aim to design AI systems that are not only powerful, but also safe, resilient, and aligned with human decision making, particularly in high stakes or uncertain settings. Ultimately, I hope my work will contribute to reducing cognitive burden for practitioners and improving the reliability of AI assisted decision support systems.

Education

  • Aug 2022 – Jul 2027 (expected)
    PhD, Computer Science — Missouri University of Science & Technology
    Advisor: Dr. Sanjay Madria · CGPA: 4.00/4.00
  • 2016 – 2021
    BSc, Electrical & Electronic Engineering — Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology
    CGPA: 3.69/4.00

Research

Adversarial Attacks (Black-box / Zero-access)

Training-free adversarial text attack pipelines that combine MLM-based perturbations, semantic similarity constraints, topic-guided insertions, and phonetic perturbations.

  • Improved black-box attack success by up to 15% while keeping semantic similarity above 80%.
  • Feedback optimized attacker with iterative refinement under perplexity and similarity constraints.

Robustness through Unsupervised Re-labeling

Unsupervised pipelines for correcting noisy labels and improving robustness via representation learning.

  • Corrected mislabeled neutral samples: +10% F1, and reduced attack success by 14% on multiple LLM classifiers.
  • Uses Seq2Seq autoencoding, contrastive learning, and KL-divergence clustering components.

Beyond NLP

Experience in biomedical signal processing and deep learning for ECG-based myocardial infarction detection.

  • ECG temporal-feature framework achieved AUC 99.25% and F1 98.86%.
  • Applied YOLOv5 object detection and segmentation algorithms for a robust framework

Publications

Conference

  1. Leveraging Pre-Trained Language Models for Realistic Adversarial Attacks
    Nuzaer Omar, Sanjay Madria, Ademola Adesokan
    IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2025
  2. Detection of Myocardial Infarction from ECG Signal Through Combining CNN and Bi-LSTM
    Nuzaer Omar, M. U., M. Dey
    ICECE, 2020 · DOI: 10.1109/ICECE51571.2020.9393090

Journal

  1. Temporal Feature-Based Classification into Myocardial Infarction and other CVDs Merging CNN and Bi-LSTM from ECG signal
    Nuzaer Omar, M. U., M. Dey
    IEEE Sensors Journal, 2021 · DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2021.3079241

Projects

Modular Black-Box Adversarial Attack Framework

NLP · LLM Security · Robustness Evaluation

  • Real-time, training-free attack system with MLM perturbations, similarity filters, topic guidance, and phonetics.
  • Designed for practical black-box evaluation settings.

Unsupervised Re-labeling & Robustness Enhancement

Unsupervised Learning · Clustering · Representation Learning

  • Sim-Text keyword attribution + Seq2Seq autoencoding + contrastive learning + KL clustering.
  • Targets noisy labels and robustness in downstream classifiers.

Computer Vision Projects

Detection · Segmentation

  • YOLOv5 object detection on FLIR thermal dataset for low-visibility robustness.
  • Semantic segmentation on CARLA for pixel-level road scene parsing.

More highlights

  • Chess: from-scratch chess with optimized move generation and search.
  • NN from scratch: binary classifier with custom init, gradients, and GD training.

Teaching

Skills

Programming

Python, MATLAB, C/C++, R, Verilog, x86 Assembly

Tools & Frameworks

PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, scikit-learn, OpenAttack, Pandas, OpenCV, spaCy, NLTK, Ollama, vLLM

Databases

SQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis

Software & Research Tools

LaTeX, Overleaf, Git, Docker, Slurm, GNS3, Proteus, Cadence Virtuoso, PSpice

Machine Learning

CNNs, Autoencoders / VAEs, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, YOLOv5 / YOLOv8, Clustering

NLP / LLMs

Transformer Models (BERT, T5, GPT, BART, LLaMA), Adversarial Attacks & Defenses, Prompt Engineering, Decoding Strategies, Semantic Similarity (SBERT), Text Generation, Topic Modeling, Phonetic & Lexical Perturbations

Optimization & Modeling

Loss Design (Contrastive, Reconstruction, Triplet, KL), Hyperparameter Tuning, Model Calibration

Awards & Service

Awards & Programs

  • Kummer Innovation & Entrepreneurship Doctoral Fellows Program (2022–2026)
  • NSF Local I-CORPS, Great Lakes Region (2025)
  • Mentored a PCIU team: Top-20 placement in “Mujib 100 Idea Contest” (2022)

Professional Service

  • Reviewer: ICDM 2025, IEEE Big Data 2024–2025, ECML 2025, etc.

Contact

Email: nom8m@umsystem.edu · nuzaeromar97@gmail.com