| Aug 20, 2026 | Five papers accepted to the EMNLP 2026 main conference. The papers span multimodal event understanding, long video understanding, and the reliability and factuality of vision-language models. |
| Jul 23, 2026 | My Ph.D. student Hani Alomari has been awarded an Amazon Fellowship. Congratulations to Hani! |
| Jun 18, 2026 | Named an Outstanding Area Chair at CVPR 2026. I also gave an invited talk at the CVPR 2026 Area Chair workshop. |
| Jun 18, 2026 | Our paper SoundBreak was accepted to ACL 2026. The paper shows that adversarial changes to only the audio channel can cause severe failures in models that jointly process audio, video, and text. |
| Jun 18, 2026 | Our paper on reasoning-guided part-level visual grounding was accepted to ECCV 2026. The paper uses reinforcement learning to teach multimodal models to locate fine-grained object parts by first reasoning about the whole object. |
| Jun 18, 2026 | Our paper on multi-robot ground video sensemaking was accepted to CHI 2026. Working with public safety professionals, we designed and evaluated tools that help operators make sense of video from fleets of ground robots. |
| Mar 19, 2026 | Three of my Ph.D. students secured summer research internships at Amazon, Adobe, and Futurewei. Very proud of their hard work! |
| Feb 20, 2026 | Two papers accepted to CVPR 2026. One paper introduces a new approach for understanding and retrieving images with multiple meanings. The other develops new techniques to prevent misuse of models for harmful tasks. |
| Jan 13, 2026 | Received a NIFA funded AgriProspects grant for developing AI‑enhanced workforce training. Thanks to the AgriProspects team and the Extension Foundation for supporting this work. |
| Dec 22, 2025 | Excited to co-organize the first Generative AI for XR and Identity-based Applications (GenXR-ID) workshop at CVPR 2026. Our workshop brings together work at the intersection of multimodality, generative models, extended reality, and biometrics. |
| Nov 07, 2025 | Our paper on a new type of multi-image adversarial attack on multimodal large language models was accepted to AAAI 2026. |
| Aug 07, 2025 | Two papers accepted to EMNLP 2025 main. One paper introduces a new architecture for flexible-length discrete diffusion LLM infilling, and our other paper tackles question answering bias in VLMs. We also had two Findings papers accepted, which introduce new methods for steering and fine-grained classification in VLMs. |
| Jun 13, 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 30, 2025 | Received a Google Research Scholar award for a project on making multimodal web agents safer. Thanks Google! |
| May 15, 2025 | My student Hani Alomari’s paper on embedding diversity for cross-modal retrieval was accepted to ACL 2025. |
| Sep 26, 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 18, 2024 | Our work on multimodal fine-grained inconsistency detection was accepted to EMNLP 2024. |
| Jun 28, 2024 | We received multiple research grants from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative for a variety of cybersecurity themed projects. Thanks CCI! |
| May 15, 2024 | Our work on multidocument, multimodal evidence summarization was accepted to ACL 2024. |
| Feb 26, 2024 | Our work on defending vision-language models against adversarial attacks was accepted to CVPR 2024. |
| Dec 08, 2023 | Our paper on predicting cross-modal event relations was accepted to AAAI 2024 |
| Nov 10, 2023 | Our work on fine-grained multidocument multimodal inconsistency checking was featured in Columbia Engineering Magazine (“When Trust Is a Factor”) |
| May 13, 2023 | Awarded CVPR 2023 Outstanding Reviewer |
| Jul 01, 2022 | Our paper on fine-grained visual entailment was accepted to ECCV 2022 |
| Jun 01, 2022 | Our journal article on using weak caption supervision for object detection was accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) |
| Aug 01, 2021 | Awarded ICCV 2021 Outstanding Reviewer |
| Jun 01, 2021 | Our journal article on predicting visual political bias was accepted to the International Journal of Computer Vision |
| May 02, 2021 | Our paper on fine-grained cross-modal consistency checking for fake news detection was accepted as an oral to ACL 2021 |
| May 01, 2021 | Awarded CVPR 2021 Outstanding Reviewer |