Last updated: 25 Feb 2026
Usman Naseem
I am currently a lecturer (~Assistant Professor) in the School of Computing at Macquarie University. Previously, I held a lecturer position in the College of CSE at James Cook University and worked as a research fellow at the University of Sydney and the University of South Australia. I earned my PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia. Before transitioning to academia, I worked in the industry for over 10 years in various technical and leadership roles. My research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is structured around three interconnected themes: (i) Trust and Safety, (ii) LLM Alignment, and (iii) NLP for Social Good. A central focus of my current work is LLM Alignment with Human Preferences, Values, Cultures, and Safety, exploring how large language models can reason more reliably, reflect diverse worldviews, and operate responsibly in real-world contexts. This involves developing frameworks for value-sensitive, safety-aware, pluralistic, and culturally aligned modeling, ensuring that systems behave in ways that are ethical, contextually appropriate, and aligned with human intentions. I lead the NLP for Social Good Lab - SocialNLP, where we develop safe, aligned, and socially impactful language technologies with real-world applications. I actively publish and contribute to the academic community by serving on program committees, including as Program Co-Chair (WebConf 2026 Web4Good), Senior Area Chair (EMNLP 2025, EACL 2026), and Area Chair for ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, and ACM MM, as well as reviewing for top journals and funding agencies. I am honored to be the recipient of several national and international awards and fellowships, including 5 Best Paper Awards and the DAAD AINet fellowship (2023–2024). My work has been adopted by industry and covered in Australian media.

News

Jan 2026: Won the Best Paper Award at AAAI 2026 for our work on LLM. Congratulations to everyone!
Jan 2026: 6 papers have been accepted at WebConf (WWW) 2026. Congratulations to everyone!
Jan 2026: 5 papers (3 Main and 2 Findings) have been accepted at EACL 2026. Congratulations to everyone!
Dec 2025: Congrats to Ada for winning the Best Paper Award at Agent AI @ Big Data 2025 for work on AI Safety.
Nov 2025: 2 papers (1 Main and 1 Demo) accepted at AAAI 2026. Congratulations!
Nov 2025: Received the Outstanding Senior Area Chair Award at EMNLP 2025.
Oct 2025: Presenting two papers at ALTA 2025 and delivering a tutorial on LLM Alignment.
Oct 2025: Received FSE Travel Grant and listed in Top 2% Research Scientists.
Sep 2025: Congrats to Afrozah for winning Best Paper and Best Presentation Awards at CASE @ RANLP 2025.
Aug 2025: 10 papers accepted at EMNLP 2025 (3 Main, 4 Findings, 2 Industry, 1 Workshop).
Aug 2025: Delivering tutorials on AI Alignment at ALTA 2025 and AJCAI 2025.
July 2025: Serving as PC Co-Chair of The Web Conference (Web4Good Track), 2026.
July 2025: SemEval-2026 Shared Task proposal accepted.
May 2025: 3 papers accepted at ACL (Main) 2025.
April 2025: 4 papers accepted at IJCAI 2025.
April 2025: Paper accepted at ICWSM 2025.
April 2025: Awarded DAIRNET EMCR Research Collaboration Grant.
March 2025: Paper accepted at SIGIR 2025.
Feb 2025: Hiring multiple exceptional PhD students — Apply now!
Jan 2025: 5 papers accepted at WebConf, 2 at AAAI, and 1 at NAACL.
Dec 2024: 2 papers accepted at COLING 2025.
Nov 2024: Won Best Student Paper Award at AJCAI 2024.
Nov 2024: Workshop (MM4SG) accepted at WebConf and ACL 2025.
Nov 2024: 1 paper accepted at ALTA 2024.
Sep 2024: Paper accepted at EMNLP 2024 (Main).
Sep 2024: Selected among World’s Top 2% Scientists 2024.
Aug 2024: Awarded DAAD Research Stay Fellowship.
July 2024: 3 papers accepted at ACM MM 2024 (CORE A*).
July 2024: 1 paper accepted at CIKM 2024.
June 2024: Invited to serve as AC @ COLING 2025.
June 2024: Received multiple research fundings including fully-funded PhD scholarship.
May 2024: Invited talks at NTU, A*Star, ISI Foundation, MBZUAI.
April 2024: Accepted into OpenAI API Researcher Access Program.
April 2024: 4 papers at LREC-COLING (1 Main, 3 Workshops).
April 2024: 5 papers at WebConf (2 Main, 3 Workshops).
March 2024: 3 workshop papers accepted at WebConf 2024.
March 2024: 1 paper accepted at LREC-COLING.
Feb 2024: 2 papers accepted at WebConf (Main & Web4Good).
Feb 2024: Joined Macquarie University as Lecturer (~Assistant Professor).

Selected Publications

AI Alignment

Do Large Language Models Reflect Demographic Pluralism in Safety?
Usman Naseem, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Sushant Kumar Ray, Rafiq Ali, Ebad Shabbir, Abdullah Mohammad
EACL 2026
When the Model Said'No Comment', We Knew Helpfulness Was Dead, Honesty Was Alive, and Safety Was Terrified
Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Mark Dras, Usman Naseem
EACL 2026
A Survey of Progress in LLM Alignment from the Perspective of Reward Design
Miaomiao Ji, Yanqiu Wu, Zhibin Wu, Shoujin Wang, Jian Yang, Mark Dras, Usman Naseem
IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2026
Alignment of large language models with human preferences and values
Usman Naseem, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Kaixuan Ren, Yiran Zhang, Utsav Maskey, Juan Ren, Afrozah Nadeem
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), 2025

Mechanistic Interpretability

Mechanistic Interpretability for Large Language Model Alignment: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions
Usman Naseem
arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11180, 2026
SafeConstellations: Steering LLM Safety to Reduce Over-Refusals through Task-Specific Trajectory
Utsav Maskey, Sumit Yadav, Mark Dras, Usman Naseem
arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.11290, 2025

NLP Applications & Social Good

From Native Memes to Global Moderation: Cross-Cultural Evaluation of Vision-Language Models for Hateful Meme Detection
Mo Wang, Kaixuan Ren, Pratik Jalan, Ahmed Ashraf, Tuong Vy Vu, Rahul Seetharaman, Shah Nawaz, Usman Naseem
The Web Conference (WebConf), 2026
PersoPilot: An Adaptive AI-Copilot for Transparent Contextualized Persona Classification and Personalized Response Generation
Saleh Afzoon, Amin Beheshti, Usman Naseem
ICDM 2025 (Demo)
They Said Memes Were Harmless — We Found the Ones That Hurt: Decoding Jokes, Symbols, and Cultural References
Sahil Tripathi, Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Mehwish Nasim, Jian Yang, Jiechao Gao, Usman Naseem
The Web Conference (WebConf), 2026
Robust Harmful Meme Detection under Missing Modalities via Shared Representation Learning
Felix Breiteneder, Mohammad Belal, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Shahed Masoudian, Usman Naseem, Kulshrestha Juhi, Markus Schedl, Shah Nawaz
The Web Conference (WebConf), 2026