Masudur Rahman

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PostDoc @PurdueEngineers (IE), Ph.D in CS@Purdue

Email: rahman64@purdue.edu

My research focuses on developing principled and adaptable intelligence for autonomous systems operating in complex, high-stakes environments. I investigate generalization, and sample efficiency in decision-making under uncertainty, with an emphasis on algorithms that enable agents to reason, adapt, and act in dynamic settings. I design novel reinforcement learning algorithms and advance the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs and LLMs), with a focus on grounded, interactive environments. These contributions enable high-impact applications, including burn diagnosis through medical imaging, and medical and emergency robotics, where systems must perceive affordances and improvise actions in unstructured, rapidly evolving conditions.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, working with Dr. Juan P. Wachs. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University in 2024 under the supervision of Dr. Yexiang Xue. I completed my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Virginia in 2018. Before that, I worked as a Lecturer at BRAC University from 2013 to 2015, after earning my B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering from BUET in 2013.

news

May 25, 2025 An abstract paper has been accepted to the Plastic Surgery The Meeting (PSTM) 2025.
The work will be presented at PSTM 2025 — the premier annual conference organized by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS)— at the New Orleans, Louisiana, in October 2025.
May 20, 2025 An abstract paper has been accepted to the Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS) 2025.
Paper title: A Chain-of-Thought AI Reasoning Framework for Burn Diagnosis.
The work will be presented at MHSRS — the leading forum for military health research — at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Kissimmee, FL, in August 2025.
May 12, 2025 A paper has been accepted to the Annual Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA) 2025.
Paper title: Knowledge-Driven Hypothesis Generation for Burn Diagnosis from Ultrasound with a Vision-Language Model.
Attending MIUA in July in Leeds, UK.
Mar 17, 2025 A paper got accepted to the Military Medicine Journal 2025. Paper title: A Framework for Advancing Burn Assessment with Artificial Intelligence.
Nov 27, 2024 Completed NSF I-Corps Hub: Great Lakes Region. Digital Badge.
Nov 04, 2024 Started my PostDoc at Purdue Engineering (IE).
Sep 24, 2024 Defended my Ph.D. Thesis.
Jul 31, 2024 Presenting a paper on AI for burn care at the Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS) 2024 in August, Kissimmee, FL.
Jul 31, 2024 Lightning talk on AI in Burn Surgery at ADSA 2024 in October at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jul 31, 2024 Tutorial session on RL Benchmarking at ADSA 2024 in October at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

selected publications

  1. MIUA
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    Knowledge-Driven Hypothesis Generation for Burn Diagnosis from Ultrasound with Vision- Language Model.
    Md Masudur Rahman, Mohamed El Masry, Gayle Gordillo, and Juan P. Wachs
    2025
  2. MHSRS-Abstract
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    A Chain-of-Thought AI Reasoning Framework for Burn Diagnosis
    Md Masudur Rahman, Mohamed El Masry, Gayle Gordillo, and Juan P. Wachs
    In In Military Health System Research Symposium , 2025
  3. NAACL
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    Natural Language-based State Representation in Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Md Masudur Rahman, and Yexiang Xue
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024 Appears in NeurIPS 2023 Foundation Models for Decision Making Workshop (FMDM) Workshop , 2024
  4. ECML-PKDD
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    Bootstrap State Representation using Style Transfer for Better Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Md Masudur Rahman, and Yexiang Xue
    In European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD) , 2022
  5. ICRA
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    Deserts: Delay-tolerant semi-autonomous robot teleoperation for surgery
    Glebys Gonzalez, Mridul Agarwal, Mythra V Balakuntala, Md Masudur Rahman, Upinder Kaur, Richard M Voyles, Vaneet Aggarwal, Yexiang Xue, and Juan Wachs
    In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , 2021
  6. Biomedical Journal
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    SARTRES: A semi-autonomous robot teleoperation environment for surgery
    Md Masudur Rahman*, Mythra V Balakuntala*, Glebys Gonzalez, Mridul Agarwal, Upinder Kaur, Vishnunandan LN Venkatesh, Natalia Sanchez-Tamayo, Yexiang Xue, Richard M Voyles, Vaneet Aggarwal, and Juan Wachs
    Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, 2021
  7. IROS
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    Desk: A robotic activity dataset for dexterous surgical skills transfer to medical robots
    Naveen Madapana*, Md Masudur Rahman*, Natalia Sanchez-Tamayo*, Mythra V Balakuntala, Glebys Gonzalez, Jyothsna Padmakumar Bindu, LN Vishnunandan Venkatesh, Xingguang Zhang, Juan Barragan Noguera, Thomas Low, and  others
    In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) , 2019
  8. RO-MAN
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    Transferring Dexterous Surgical Skill Knowledge between Robots for Semi-autonomous Teleoperation
    Md Masudur Rahman*, Natalia Sanchez-Tamayo*, Glebys Gonzalez, Mridul Agarwal, Vaneet Aggarwal, Richard M Voyles, Yexiang Xue, and Juan Wachs
    In 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) , 2019