A S M Iftekhar

Research Scientist at Microsoft

[A S M Iftekhar @ASMIftekhar1]

@yoshitomo_cs ACs should just discard poor quality reviews.

[JHU Computer Science @JHUCompSci]

and “Jailbreak Distillation: Renewable Safety Benchmarking” by @jackjingyuzhang, @ben_vandurme, @DanielKhashabi, @aagohary, @ASMIftekhar1, & more proposed a novel framework that “distills” jailbreak attacks into high-quality safety 🦺 benchmarks: https://t.co/48D5m1bREv (7/7)

[A S M Iftekhar @ASMIftekhar1]

@soumithchintala Thanks a lot for pytorch!

[A S M Iftekhar @ASMIftekhar1]

@xwang_lk you should just send this.

[Lucas Beyer (bl16) @giffmana]

Now some of the downsides of my experience with "vibe-coding for serious work".

First, recap the good sides I mentioned previously: it's amazing at quick prototyping things, making tiny throw-away hyper-specialized demos, taking care of boilerplate, setup, and writing tests for me.

Now the bad part: the code it generates is insanely verbose, overly defensive, bloated, and sometimes plain dumb. The models (I tried Claude code 4 and Codex Gpt5) have two big issues:

1) The model fully trusts you and takes what you say to the extreme. If you mention a requirement, it applies it to everything like a pedant, even if that forces quite insane contortion. A real good human coder would be like "ok wait, but this will make things extremely convoluted for XYZ, do you really mean this to apply here too?" and the answer is most likely "no, I didn't intend that"

2) The model never takes a step back and reconsiders/refactors things. It loves piling shit on top of more shit. A good human programmer would suddenly go "ok, that's a lot, let's simplify/unify things here for a bit". Even if you ask the model to do this, it usually sucks at simplifying.

Two concrete real-life examples I had:

1) I had some pytorch distributed issue where some gathers in a library of mine would sometimes hang or die out of sync. Claude correctly identified that the process group was not always correctly initialized. So it started writing hundreds of lines of bookkeeping boilerplate to my library to try fixing this (and eventually did fix). After I looked at its fix, I immediately notice that the real fix was just moving my library's init call after torch distributed init, not before🤦‍♂️ So the real fix involved not a single new line of code, but Claude loves writing more lines!

2) In another library I made rapid iterations with Codex on the design. The core of the library boils down to a kind of graph where you need to walk through the nodes and do work on a node, while stopping on loops. Codex did correctly implement it, and it works; however, it wrote very convoluted code for the core logic, about 200 lines of code with two functions recursing into each other, and a few stacks and queues for traversal bookkeeping.
After looking at it and taking a step back, I rewrote the whole thing from scratch in maybe 40 clear lines of code. It was great having Codex's extensive unit-tests to see that my rewrite is correct.

So, in conclusion, the current state of vibe-coding is good for boilerplate, rapid iteration/prototyping, or one-off throwaway tools. For code that you intend to use, keep, extend, maintain for a while, you're always better off (re)writing it by hand.
Maybe only after the LLM-assisted exploration and unit-test writing, though!

[Lucas Beyer (bl16) @giffmana]

@suchenzang Literally me in half my code reviews lately. "Did you vibe code this?!" Is a meme over here now

[Jack Jingyu Zhang @jackjingyuzhang]

Many thanks to my amazing collaborators @aagohary, Xiawei Wang,
@ASMIftekhar1, Ahmed Magooda, @ben_vandurme, @DanielKhashabi, and Kyle Jackson!

Work done at @Microsoft Responsible AI @MSFTResearch and @jhuclsp @JHUCompSci.

[Minh-Quan Le @lmquancs]

🚀 Introducing Hummingbird 🐦: High-Fidelity Image Generation via Multimodal Context Alignment! 🎨✨

We’re excited to announce Hummingbird’s acceptance to ICLR 2025! 🎉 Developed during my Microsoft internship, it explores new approaches to high-fidelity image generation.

Hummingbird, a diffusion-based image generator, creates high-quality images using multimodal contexts including reference images and text. It ensures scene-aware generation, preserving scene attributes while maintaining diversity.

🌐 Project: https://t.co/Pnnb9MTv1W
📄 Paper: https://t.co/1VlT6VMDol

Thanks to my amazing collaborators @mitts1910, @MengTianjian, @ASMIftekhar1, Vishwas, Barun, Dimitris, and Mei for their insights and dedication! 🙌 We welcome your feedback! 🏆 #ICLR2025

[Sayed Rouf🇧🇩🇵🇸 @sayedrouf4]

Openly injuring a civilian unprovoked..

#Bangladesh #StudentsUnderAttack
#StepDownHasina

[Sami @ZulkarnainSaer]

Bangladesh's Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting @MAarafat71, stated,

"𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞, 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐬."

Does he even understand what he is saying? How disrespectful it is to speak so callously about the innocent young men, who lost their lives due to police brutality. It is fortunate that the government itself provided subtitles for his statement. I kindly request members of the international press to take note of this obnoxious and unacceptable comment by Arafat, as well as his attempt to malign opposition political parties. It is unbelievable that someone can stoop so low.

[Lloyd Doggett @RepLloydDoggett]

Bangladesh’s PM Hasina is using the tyrant’s handbook with armed troops, digital blackout, and “shoot-on-sight” orders to crush student protestors. Bangladeshi Americans are blocked from determining safety of loved ones. Hasina must face consequences for the “busloads” of the dead on her hands.
https://t.co/Ctsp6ymqNK

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @RepAOC]

Dozens of protestors have been killed by Bangladeshi authorities in recent days. My constituents cannot reach their loved ones due to a government implemented communications blackout.

I call for an end to the blackout and de-escalation of violence against protestors.

[A S M Iftekhar @ASMIftekhar1]

Hey @elonmusk is it possible to provide starlink connections to Bangladesh? Bangladeshi Govt has shutdown all communications with the outside world after a day of violent protest.

[Sami @ZulkarnainSaer]

Bangladesh has been cut off from all international communication. The authoritarian regime has shut down the cellular network and the internet. Fixed landlines are not working—it's a total blackout.

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

Pedro, doesn't seem to understand there's a real emergency here.

If we figure 250M users of LLMs, conservatively, and the shocking incidence rate tracked by Doomers last year of 121 "incidents" which includes such society shattering events as the Pope in a puffer jacket, then we have a 0.000048% incident rate, roughly below the rate of injury from water guns, but above the rate of injury from garden snails.

Something must be done now before it's too late! It's gotten out of control!

It's gotten so out of control that we should put the bills that prohibit time travel and transdimensional vampire invasions on hold to address this more pressing issue immediately.

As for folks out there working to make a difference, we encourage everyone in college looking to volunteer or donate time and money to focus on magical, time traveling superintelligence from the future as your primary concern. Smaller concerns like poverty, inequality, and political repression can wait!

We're also encouraging all college campuses and high schools to make AI Fear Mental Health support a top priority, and to ensure it's included with full coverage by today's greedy insurance companies. If you're having hallucinations about magical future AI, you shouldn't have to wonder who you can turn to in your time of need! There is hope!

[A S M Iftekhar @ASMIftekhar1]

@giffmana @savvyRL hmm, so just like the crystal clear definition of embeddings!

[Arvind Narayanan @random_walker]

OpenAI released GPT-3.5 and then GPT-4 just a couple of months later (even though the latter had been in development for a while). This historical accident had the unintended effect of giving people a greatly exaggerated sense of the pace of LLM improvements, and led to a thousand overreactions ranging from influencer bros to x-risk panic (remember the "pause" letter?). It's taken more than a year for the discourse to cool down a bit and start to look more like a regular tech cycle.

[Gaurav @mitts1910]

📢🔥#HIRING Summer Research Interns 2024! Responsible and #OpenAI Research (ROAR) team at @Microsoft is hiring Research Interns in Multimodal AI/Video Understanding to publish at top-tier venues like CVPR/ICCV/ICLR/NeurIPS. Please apply here: https://t.co/vaNFHKgstM

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

In AI, the ratio of attention on hypothetical, future, forms of harm to actual, current, realized forms of harm seems out of whack.

Many of the hypothetical forms of harm, like AI "taking over", are based on highly questionable hypotheses about what technology that does not currently exist might do.

Every field should examine both future and current problems. But is there any other engineering discipline where this much attention is on hypothetical problems rather than actual problems?

[Matthew Leavitt @leavittron]

v excited to finally announce our new work that formalizes one of the most effective practices for training LLMs—something that many industry leaders have conspicuously avoided discussing