Chris Thomas

chris_thomas_photo.jpg

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!
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

  1. Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval
    Hani Alomari, Anushka Sivakumar, Andrew Zhang, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (To appear), 2025
  2. M3D: MultiModal MultiDocument Fine-Grained Inconsistency Detection
    Chia-Wei Tang, Ting-Chih Chen, Kiet Nguyen, and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2024
  3. Journeybench: A challenging one-stop vision-language understanding benchmark of generated images
    Zhecan Wang, Junzhang Liu, Chia-Wei Tang, and 8 more authors
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
  4. MetaSumPerceiver: Multimodal Multi-Document Evidence Summarization for Fact-Checking
    Ting-Chih Chen, Chia-Wei Tang, and Christopher Thomas
    In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2024
  5. Semantic Shield: Defending Vision-Language Models Against Backdooring and Poisoning via Fine-grained Knowledge Alignment
    Alvi Md Ishmam, and Christopher Thomas
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024
  6. Beyond Grounding: Extracting Fine-Grained Event Hierarchies across Modalities
    Hammad Ayyubi, Christopher Thomas, Lovish Chum, and 8 more authors
    In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2024
  7. Fine-Grained Visual Entailment
    Christopher Thomas, Yipeng Zhang, and Shih-Fu Chang
    In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision, 2022
  8. InfoSurgeon: Cross-Media Fine-grained Information Consistency Checking for Fake News Detection
    Yi Fung, Christopher Thomas, Revanth Reddy, and 6 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021
  9. Preserving Semantic Neighborhoods for Robust Cross-modal Retrieval
    Christopher Thomas, and Adriana Kovashka
    In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020
  10. Predicting the politics of an image using webly supervised data
    Christopher Thomas, and Adriana Kovashka
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019), 2019