Chris Thomas

378 Data and Decision Sciences Building
727 Prices Fork Rd
Blacksburg, VA 24060
(540) 231-2993
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. My research is at the intersection of computer vision, natural language processing, and multimedia. I am interested in many problems requiring reasoning across multimodal data, including cross-modal retrieval, information extraction, and knowledge representation. I am associated with the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.
Prior to joining Virginia Tech, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University working with Professor Shih-Fu Chang.
Recent News
Jun 2025 | We received a research grant from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative for an exciting project related to protecting embodied agents against adversarial attacks. Thanks CCI! |
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May 2025 | Received a Google Research Scholar award for a project on making multimodal web agents safer. Thanks Google! |
May 2025 | My student Hani Alomari’s paper on embedding diversity for cross-modal retrieval was accepted to ACL 2025. |
Sep 2024 | Was pleased to lead a multi-institution collaboration between Virginia Tech, Columbia, and UCLA to create JourneyBench, which was accepted to NeurIPS 2024. |
Sep 2024 | Our work on multimodal fine-grained inconsistency detection was accepted to EMNLP 2024. |
Jun 2024 | We received multiple research grants from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative for a variety of cybersecurity themed projects. Thanks CCI! |
Selected Publications
- Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal RetrievalIn Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (To appear), 2025