Mir Nafis Sharear Shopnil
Applying for PhD (Fall 2026) · Open to Research Engineer roles

Mir Nafis Sharear Shopnil

AI researcher working on LLM reasoning, mechanistic interpretability, and agentic systems.

I'm an AI Engineer at Technovative Solutions (Manchester) and a Research Fellow at Fatima Fellowship. My work sits at the intersection of multi-agent reasoning, verifiable evidence, and the tools we use to tell when a model is actually thinking — and when it's just confabulating.

§ 01 · Currently

What I'm working on

Updated Apr 2026
Aug 2025 → AI Engineer, Lead Architect at Technovative Solutions — architecting agentic workflows for EU climate-adaptation programmes (CLIMATEAdaptEOSC, EcoPlast). Operationalising foundation models (Prithvi EO, SimCLR) as containerised services. Mentoring 10 junior engineers.
Sep 2024 → Research Fellow at Fatima Fellowship — building MERIT, a verifiable multimodal misinformation pipeline. Submitted to COLM 2026; companion GNN paper accepted at PP-MisDet@CVPR 2026.
Reading Anthropic's circuit-level interp work, the DeepSeek reasoning reports, and anything that makes tool-use traces auditable rather than impressive.
Looking for PhD advisors in LLM reasoning, mechanistic interpretability, and agentic systems (CMU · MIT · Stanford · Edinburgh) — and research-engineer roles where the research is still real.
§ 02 · Research

A through-line

2021 → 2026

I started out in undergrad trying to explain black-box rumour-detection models — why does this LSTM flag a post as a lie? That question has followed me through every project since, and has kept sharpening.

If a model's output can't be audited — traced back to evidence, to a rationale, to a circuit — then for high-stakes work it may as well be a coin flip with confidence.

My MSc pushed me toward graph neural networks: structure is a useful prior when you're trying to reason about relations between claims and evidence. At Fatima Fellowship I got to put that into practice — first as a cross-graph GNN, then as an agentic pipeline (MERIT) where LVLMs plan, call web-search tools, and build verifiable evidence graphs before committing to an answer.

What I want to do next, in a PhD, is go one level deeper: not just build reasoning systems but understand them. Mechanistic interpretability of multi-step reasoning, especially in agentic settings where one model delegates to tools or to other models. How does reasoning compose? Where does it break? Can we build agents whose chains we can audit the way we audit circuits?

i.

Reasoning in LLMs

Chain-of-thought is convenient but unfaithful. I'm interested in what counts as actual reasoning inside a forward pass, and how the scratchpad relates to the computation.

ii.

Mechanistic interpretability

Circuits-level methods — SAEs, causal mediation, activation patching — applied to the reasoning traces I care about, not just toy tasks.

iii.

Agentic reasoning & communication

What happens when one reasoner delegates to another? Tool-calls as a window into compositional structure; inter-agent communication as a proxy for intermediate representation.

iv.

Verifiable evidence

Outputs are only as good as the rationales they sit on. Structured evidence (graphs, citations, tool traces) is how I keep systems honest.

§ 03 · Selected Work

Papers & preprints

See all →
Under review · COLM 2026 arXiv · 2510.17590

MERIT: A Modular Framework for Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Web-Grounded Reasoning

M. N. Sharear Shopnil, S. Duwal, A. Tyagi, A. M. Proma

An agentic pipeline that orchestrates large vision-language models with web search to build verifiable evidence graphs and traceable rationales before committing to a verdict. The point isn't accuracy — it's that you can read the trace and check the work.

Claim + Image (multimodal) LVLM Planner decompose query plan Web Search Image Retrieval Entity Grounding Fact Check APIs Evidence Graph Verdict + Rationale fig. 1 — MERIT pipeline claim → plan → tools → evidence graph → audited verdict
Fig. 1 — MERIT pipeline overview Shopnil et al., 2026
Verifiableevidence trace
Modulartool interface
Accepted · PP-MisDet @ CVPR 2026 arXiv · 2505.18221

Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Attention-Based GNNs

S. Duwal, M. N. Sharear Shopnil, A. Tyagi, A. M. Proma

We formalise claims and evidence as separate graphs and score image-text consistency with a cross-graph attention GNN. The attention maps turn out to be interpretable; the accuracy (93.05%) beats the strongest LLM baseline by 2.82 points.

claim graph evidence graph cross-graph attention consistency score fig. 2 — cross-graph attention between claim and evidence
Fig. 2 — Cross-graph attention between claim and evidence nodes Duwal, Shopnil et al., 2026
93.05%accuracy
+2.82pts vs LLM SOTA
IEEE UEMCON · 2021 Undergrad thesis work

Demystifying Black-box Learning Models of Rumor Detection from Social Media Posts

F. Tafannum, M. N. Sharear Shopnil, A. Salsabil, N. Ahmed, et al.

Applied explainable-AI techniques (LIME, attention attribution) to interpret black-box rumor detection models trained on social media data. The question that started everything: why did the model say that?

§ 04 · Projects

Things I've built

Code · Demos

MERIT — reference implementation

Open-source reference implementation of the MERIT agentic pipeline: LVLM planner, web-tool executors, and evidence-graph builder with a traceable verdict endpoint.

pythonlangchainfastapimulti-agent
2026

Prithvi EO — geospatial service

Wrapped IBM/NASA's Prithvi Earth-Observation foundation model as a containerised inference service with self-supervised vision backbones (SimCLR) for downstream climate-adaptation workflows.

foundation-modelsgeospatialdockeraws
2025

Cross-graph attention GNN

PyTorch Geometric implementation of the cross-graph attention network behind the CVPR workshop paper. Includes attention-map visualisations that actually say something about the model's reasoning.

pytorch-geometricgnninterpretability
2025

More on GitHub →

Notebooks on RAG, LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning, RLHF/GRPO experiments, and a few interpretability sketches.

raglorarlhfgrpo
2023 —
§ 06 · Background

CV, at a glance

Full CV →

Education

MSc, Artificial Intelligence — Merit (2:1)
Queen Mary University of London
2022 – 2023
BSc, Computer Science — VC's List · Dean's List
BRAC University, Dhaka
2017 – 2021

Experience

AI Engineer · Lead Architect
Technovative Solutions Ltd · Manchester
Aug 2025 —
Research Fellow
Fatima Fellowship (remote)
Sep 2024 —
Data Scientist
Faculty AI · London
May – Jul 2024

Selected tooling

Python · PyTorch · PyTorch Geometric · LangChain · RAG · LoRA / QLoRA · RLHF / GRPO · Hugging Face · FastAPI · Docker · AWS (EC2/S3) · GCP Vertex AI · W&B.

§ 07 · Teaching

Mentorship

Ongoing
Lead · 2025 — Mentor to 10 junior engineers at Technovative. I run weekly research-reading sessions and set architecture roadmaps for each programme track.
Peer · 2024 — Research peer at Fatima Fellowship — code reviews, experiment design feedback, and paper sharpening across the cohort.
Writing · 2024 Public essays on interpretability and on the psychology of early-career ML work (see Writing).

Let's talk.

If you're a professor whose lab aligns with these questions, or a team hiring for research-engineer work where the research is still real — I'd love to hear from you.

Usually respond within 24h.

Phone+44 7308 009 046
Based inManchester, UK