Mustapha Abdullahi

Espoo, Finland

I am a doctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Prof. Eric Malmi and Prof. Pekka Marttinen. My work is supported by the Finland Fellowship and the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI). My research interests are in large language models, particularly adaptive computation and mixture-of-experts models.

Prior to my PhD, I worked as a Software Engineering Intern at QuantumBlack AI Labs, McKinsey’s AI-focused division. Before that, I completed my MSc in Artificial Intelligence at Queen Mary University of London as a recipient of the Google DeepMind Scholarship and the QuantumBlack (McKinsey) & Office of AI Scholarship. I received my B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Ahmadu Bello University.

I am always interested in learning, collaborating, and discussing new research ideas. :)

News

Mar 25, 2026	🎉 Our paper “Firebolt-VL: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Cross-Modality Modulation” was accepted to the ECV Workshop @ CVPR 2026!
Aug 24, 2025	🎉 Our paper “EARL: Efficient Agentic Reinforcement Learning Systems for Large Language Models” was accepted to the Workshop on Systems for Agentic AI (SAA) @ SOSP 2025!
Jan 11, 2025	Kicked off Cohort 2 of the Deep Learning Fellowship at Arewa Data Science Academy as Lead Tutor.
Jul 04, 2024	Excited and thankful to be selected for the Finnish Doctoral Program Network in Artificial Intelligence (AI-DOC) funded by Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI).
Feb 12, 2024	Super stoked and grateful to have received the Finland Fellowship to fund my 1st year of PhD in Computer Science at Aalto University.
Oct 02, 2023	Thrilled and grateful to be starting a role as Software Engineer Intern at QuantumBlack Labs (McKinsey & Company).
Apr 20, 2023	Delighted to be selected to attend the Mediterranean Machine Learning Summer School (MLSS 2023) in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Apr 14, 2023	Super excited to be accepted to the Reinforcement Learning Summer School (RLSS 2023) in Barcelona, Spain.
Mar 29, 2023	Thrilled and grateful to be accepted to The Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School (CMMRS) 2023 in Saarbrücken, Germany.
Dec 09, 2022	Excited to be one of the awardees of the Best Graduating Engineering Student Awards by the Nigerian Society of Engineers.
Dec 01, 2022	Very honoured to be among the 14 finalists of Rhodes Scholarship, West Africa.
Aug 15, 2022	Super excited to be one of the recipients of the Google DeepMind Scholarship to study a Master’s in AI at the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London.

Selected Publications

ECV’26

Firebolt-VL: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Cross-Modality Modulation

Quoc-Huy Trinh, Mustapha Abdullahi (co-first author) , Bo Zhao, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, Jun 2026

Bib HTML PDF

@inproceedings{Trinh_2026_CVPR,
  author = {Trinh, Quoc-Huy and Abdullahi, Mustapha and Zhao, Bo and Jha, Debesh},
  title = {Firebolt-VL: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Cross-Modality Modulation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops},
  journal = {9th Workshop on Efficient Deep Learning for Computer Vision (ECV) at CVPR},
  month = jun,
  year = {2026},
  pages = {3654-3663},
}

SAA’25

EARL: Efficient Agentic Reinforcement Learning Systems for Large Language Models

Zheyue Tan, Mustapha Abdullahi , Tuo Shi, and 5 more authors

Workshop on Systems for Agentic AI (SAA), in conjunction with the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Oct 2025

Bib HTML

@article{tan2025earl,
  title = {EARL: Efficient Agentic Reinforcement Learning Systems for Large Language Models},
  author = {Tan, Zheyue and Abdullahi, Mustapha and Shi, Tuo and Yuan, Huining and Xu, Zelai and Yu, Chao and Li, Boxun and Zhao, Bo},
  journal = {Workshop on Systems for Agentic AI (SAA), in conjunction with the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)},
  month = oct,
  year = {2025},
  address = {Seoul, Korea},
}

PMLR (DLI’25)

Evaluating Deep Learning Models for African Wildlife Image Classification: From DenseNet to Vision Transformers

Lukman Jibril Aliyu, Umar Sani Muhammad, Bilqisu Ismail, and 5 more authors

Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Feb 2026

Oral Bib HTML PDF

Oral presentation; one of 19 accepted papers and among the top 7 selected for oral presentation

@article{aliyu2025evaluating,
  title = {Evaluating Deep Learning Models for African Wildlife Image Classification: From DenseNet to Vision Transformers},
  author = {Aliyu, Lukman Jibril and Muhammad, Umar Sani and Ismail, Bilqisu and Muhammad, Nasiru and Wakili, Almustapha A and Yimam, Seid Muhie and Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan and Abdullahi, Mustapha},
  journal = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  volume = {302},
  booktitle = {Deep Learning Indaba 2025 Research Track},
  month = feb,
  year = {2026},
}

JAIMLD’24

Beyond traditional assessment: Exploring the impact of large language models on grading practices

Oluwole Fagbohun, Nwaamaka Pearl Iduwe, Mustapha Abdullahi , and 2 more authors

Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science, Feb 2024

Bib HTML

@article{fagbohun2024beyond,
  title = {Beyond traditional assessment: Exploring the impact of large language models on grading practices},
  author = {Fagbohun, Oluwole and Iduwe, Nwaamaka Pearl and Abdullahi, Mustapha and Ifaturoti, Adeseye and Nwanna, OM},
  journal = {Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science},
  volume = {2},
  number = {1},
  pages = {1--8},
  month = feb,
  year = {2024},
}