I am an Associate Professor at the Computer Vision Department, MBZUAI. Previously, I was a Senior Scientist at Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence and a Research Scientist in the Computer Vision Research Group (CVRG) at Data61, CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization). I am also an adjunct faculty member at College of Electrical & Computer Science (CECS), Australian National University (ANU) since 2016. I was a research visitor at NICTA (National ICT Australia) in 2015 and also served as a research affiliate with Australian Center for Robotic Vision (ACRV).
I work on model generalization, multi-modal learning, learning from limited data (zero and few-shot learning), and continual life-long learning systems for computer vision problems. The above-mentioned tasks can help us realize intelligent autonomous systems that can better understand the real world for improved recognition, detection, segmentation, and detailed scene comprehension. I am also interested in the applications of vision and learning algorithms to earth observation and climate science.
Positions Available! I am looking for exceptional candidates for two tracks: a) PostDocs, b) Research engineers at MBZUAI. PostDoc candidates are preferred to have a background in one of these topics: Multimodal Foundational Models, World Models, VLAs, Agents, AI4Climate, Remote Sensing, Earth Observation. Research engineers must demonstrate strong development skills via past projects. Candidates are expected to have good grades in their BS/MS programs and relevant background in AI/computer vision/machine learning (demonstrated through relevant coursework and past projects). Prior publication record in CVPR/ECCV/ICCV/NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML is a plus. If you are interested, please email me your CV and a link to your GitHub profile.
🔥 News
- Our ThinkGeo work won the best paper award at MONTI workshop at CVPR, 2026!
- Honored to receive the Provost's Distinguished Research Award at MBZUAI.
- Finalist in the Scientific Research category, UAE AI Award 2025
- Our AirCast model won the best paper award at TerraBytes workshop at ICML, 2025!
- We won the 2nd place in AgentX competition (Research track, Reasoning & Planning) organized by Berkeley RDI, congratulations to all team members of Agent-VBench!
- 🎉 Congratulations to MBZUAI students Hashmat and Huzaifa on winning the Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award at ACCV’24 for our ObjectCompose work!
- Our BiMedix project, led by Dr. Hisham, has won the inaugural Llama Impact Innovation Award!
- Four papers accepted at NeurIPS’24 and ICLR’25!
- Serving as an AC for CVPR’25, NeurIPS’25, ICML’25 and ICLR’25.
- Seven papers accepted at CVPR’24! Congratulations to all students and collaborators.
- Seven papers accepted at ICCV’23! Congratulations to all team members.
- Acting as an Area Chair for CVPR’23, ICML’23 and NeurIPS’23.
- Nine papers accepted to CVPR’23! Congratulations to all students and collaborators.
- Co-organizing workshops on “Vision Transformer: Theory and Applications” at ACCV’22 (5th Dec ’22) and NeurIPS’22 (9th Dec ’22).
- Two papers accepted to NeurIPS’22! Congratulations to all students and collaborators.
- Acting as an Area Chair for NeurIPS’22 and ACML’22.
- Five papers accepted to ECCV 2022! [Jul ’22]
- Six papers accepted to CVPR 2022 (including 3 Orals)! Congratulations to all students and collaborators. [Mar ’22]
- Our paper on improving adversarial transferability of ViTs accepted in ICLR’22 as a spotlight (rate 5%). Congratulations Muzammal and Kanchana!
- 🎉 Glad to share that my Ph.D. student, Dr. Shafin Rahman, has been awarded the J.G. Crawford Prize for best thesis at ANU (Science Category). Congratulations Shafin!
- Organizing TPAMI Special Issue on “Transformers in Vision.”
đź“ť Publications
(Selected publications, full list can be found on Google Scholar)
LlamaV-o1: Rethinking Step-by-step Visual Reasoning in LLMs
O. Thawakar, D. Dissanayake, K. More, R. Thawkar, A. Heakl, N. Ahsan, Y. Li, M. Zumri, J. Lahoud, R. M. Anwer, H. Cholakkal, I. Laptev, M. Shah, F. S. Khan, S. Khan (ACL 2025)
All languages matter: Evaluating LMMs on culturally diverse 100 languages
ALM Team (CVPR 2025)
Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models
M. Maaz, H. Rasheed, S. Khan, F. S. Khan (ACL 2024)
GLaMM: Grounding Large Multimodal Model
H. A. Rasheed, M. Maaz, S. S. Mullappilly, A. M. Shaker, S. Khan, H. Cholakkal, R. M. Anwer, E. P. Xing, M.-H. Yang, F. S. Khan (CVPR 2024)
GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing
K. Kuckreja, M. S. Danish, M. Naseer, A. Das, S. Khan, F. S. Khan (CVPR 2024)
LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts
H. Gani, S. F. Bhat, M. Naseer, S. Khan, P. Wonka (ICLR 2024)
PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Image Restoration
V. Potlapalli, S. W. Zamir, S. Khan, F. Khan (NeurIPS 2023)
MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning
M. U. Khattak, H. A. Rasheed, M. Maaz, S. Khan, F. S. Khan (CVPR 2023)
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2024 Winner of Meta’s Llama Impact Innovation Awards for “BiMediX2: A Bilingual Medical LMM” (PI: Dr. Hisham).
- 2024 Best Student Paper Runner-Up – ACCV 2024 for “Object-Compose: Evaluating Resilience of Vision-Based Models”.
- 2024 PI, Silal and ADQ funded project: “AgroCastGPT: AI-Based Yield Forecasting and Recommendation Platform”.
- 2024 Co-PI, UAE Rain Enhancement Program by National Center for Meteorology: “Identification of clouds microphysical seed-ability” (PI: Prof. D. Rosenfeld).
- 2023 Google Research Award – Co-PI on “A Climate Change and Sustainability Tailored Arabic LLM” (with Dr. H. Cholakkal & Dr. R. Anwer).
- 2023 Listed among top 0.4% scientists in AI (rank 1212/356,955) by Stanford University’s top 2% list.
- 2022 Best Paper Finalist – CVPR 2022 (Burst Image Restoration and Enhancement; top 33/8161).
- 2021 NTIRE Image Enhancement Challenge – 2nd rank in CVPR-NTIRE 2021 (Dual-Pixel Defocus Deblurring).
- 2021 Outstanding Reviewer – CVPR 2021.
- 2020 Best Student Paper – ICPRAM 2020.
- 2019 NTIRE 2019 Challenge – 2nd rank (Image Enhancement) & 3rd rank (Real Image SR).
- 2019 Outstanding Reviewer – CVPR 2019; Outstanding & Emergency Reviewer – ICCV 2019.
🧰 Service
- Program Chair (PC): ACCV 2028 (upcoming)
- Area Chair (AC): Several past CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ECCV and ICLR
- Guest Editor: IEEE TPAMI, Remote Sensing (MDPI), IEEE JSTARS
- Workshop Organizer: NeurIPS’22, ICCV’23, CVPR’24-25
🙌 People
I have been fortunate to work with amazing students, colleagues and collaborators. Below is a non-exhaustive list.
Students
Current
- Muhammad Maaz (MS@MBZUAI, 2020-2022; PhD@MBZUAI, 2022-)
- Hanoona Abdul Rasheed (MS@MBZUAI, 2020-2022; PhD@MBZUAI, 2022-)
- Muhammad Ali (PhD@MBZUAI, 2020-)
- Hashmat Shadab Malik (MS@MBZUAI, 2020-2022; PhD@MBZUAI, 2022-)
- Muhammad Sohail (PhD@MBZUAI, 2023-)
- Akashah Shabbir (PhD@MBZUAI, 2023-)
Former
- Sameera Ramasinghe (PhD@ANU, 2018-2022) (joined Amazon)
- Muzammal Naseer (PhD@ANU, 2017-2022) (joined MBZUAI)
- Moshiur Farazi (PhD@ANU, 2016-2020) (joined Data61, CSIRO)
- Shafin Rehman (PhD@ANU, 2016-2020) (Awarded J.G. Crawford Prize for the best thesis at ANU) (joined North South University)
- Lin Li (PhD@ANU, 2017-2022) (joined Sensetime)
- Hanif Rasyidi (PhD@ANU, 2017-2022) (joined Canberra University)
- Abass Bamidele Abdulsalam (MS@MBZUAI, 2020-2022)
- Rushali Grandhe (MS@MBZUAI, 2020-2022) (joined OurCrowd)
- Abdelrahman Mohamed (MS@MBZUAI, 2020-2022) (joined MBZUAI)
- Muhammad Uzair Khattak (MS@MBZUAI, 2021-2023) (joined Max Planck Institute)
- Zhang Sheng (MS@MBZUAI, 2021-2023)
Research Interns/Engineers/Visitors
- Amaya Dharmasiri (MBZUAI, 2022) (joined Princeton)
- Syed Talal Wasim (MBZUAI, 2022-2023) (joined University of Bonn)
- Vaishnav Potlapalli (MBZUAI, 2022-2023) (joined New York University)
- Vishal Thengane (MBZUAI, 2022-2023) (joined University of Surrey)
- Muhammad Akhtar Munir (MBZUAI, 2022-)
- Kanchana Ranasinghe (MBZUAI, 2020-2021) (joined Stony Brook University, NY)
- Mohamed Afham (MBZUAI, 2021) (joined Meta AI)
- Fahad Shamshad (MBZUAI, 2020-2021) (joined MBZUAI)
- Jathushan Rajasegaran (IIAI, 2019-2020) (joined University of California, Berkeley)
- Guolei Sun (IIAI, 2018-2019) (joined ETH Zurich)
- Nasir Hayat (IIAI, 2019-2020) (joined New York University AD)
- Aamir Mustafa (IIAI, 2018-2019) (joined University of Cambridge)
- Yaxing Wang (IIAI, 2019) (joined Nankai University)
- Jose Joseph (IIAI, 2019-2021) (joined Adobe)
- Guodong Ding (ANU, 2017-2018) (joined National University of Singapore)