Zaigham Zaheer

I am a Research Scientist at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), United Arab Emirates.

Work Experience

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• Research Scientist Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE. (Jan 2025 - now)
• Research Fellow Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE. (Aug 2022 - Dec 2024)
• Postdoctoral Researcher Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Uslan Lab, South Korea. (Feb 2022 - Jul 2022)
• Visiting Researcher ETH Zurich, Switzerland. (Oct 2021 - Dec 2021)
• Internee MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi. Remote (Aug 2021 - Jan 2022)
• Student Researcher ETRI, Daejeon, South Korea. (Mar 2018 - Jan 2022)

Education

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• PhD ICT/Computer Software with specialization in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision from the University of Science and Technology (UST), South Korea, in 2022, advised by Prof. Seung-Ik Lee.
• Masters Electronics and Computer Engineering with specialization in Artificial Intelligence from Chonnam National University (CNU), South Korea, in 2017, advised by Prof. Kim Jin Young.
• Undergraduate Computer and Information Sciences from Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), in 2012.

Other Experiences

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During my Masters, I also worked at Waseda University as an intern. During my PhD, I worked on several interesting industrial projects in close collaboration with teams from LG Electronics, Korea Institute of Robotics & Technology Convergence (KIRO), and Seoul National University (SNU)

Research Interests

I have been working on projects covering some of the advanced topics of machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The following diagram represents some of the major areas I have focused on over the last few years:

Projects / Demos

Due to limited time, I am unable to add all here. However, will peridically add more here soon. Nevertheless, if you have any specific questions about any of my projects or papers, please feel free to write an email.

• Anomaly Detection Robot for Industrial Applications:

• Surveillance Vidoes Analysis for Weakly-Supervised Anomalous Event Localization (External Youtube Link):

News & Publications

• [Nov. 2025] A new survey on ‘Multimodal Learning Under Imperfect Data Conditions’ is now available online. [Link]
• [Nov. 2025] RobustA: A new benchmark and method for Robust Anomaly Detection in Multimodal Anomaly Detection Data . [Link]
• [Sep. 2025] Vocabulary-free Fine-grained Visual Recognition via Enriched Contextually Grounded Vision-Language Model @ ICCV workshops. [Link]
• [Aug. 2025] SPARTA: Spectral Prompt Agnostic Adversarial Attack on Medical Vision-Language Models. [Link]
• [Jul. 2025] A new survey on AI in Agriculture covering Deep Learning Techniques for Crops, Fisheries and Livestock. [Link]
• [Jun. 2025] Chameleon: A Multimodal Learning Framework Robust to Missing Modalities -> Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval. [Link]
• [Jun. 2025] FusedVision: A Knowledge-Infusing Approach for Practical Anomaly Detection in Real-world Surveillance Videos @ CVPR workshops. [Link]
• [Jun. 2025] ARDGen: Augmentation Regularization for Domain-Generalized Medical Report Generation @ CVPR workshops. [Link]
• [Jun. 2025] How good is my histopathology vision-language foundation model? A holistic benchmark. [Link]
• [Oct. 2024] Organizing FAME Challenge in ACM Multimedia Conference’24. [Link]
• [Sep. 2024] Paper accepted for publication at ICDM 2024. [Link]
• [Aug. 2024] New Survey on Self-Supervised Learning Mechanisms for Vision Transformers. [Link]
• [Feb. 2024] Two papers accepted for publication at CVPR 2024. [Paper 1], [Paper 2]
• [Oct. 2023] Paper accepted for publication at WACV 2024. [Link]
• [May. 2023] Paper accepted for publication at Neurocomputing Journal (IF: 5.5). [Link]
• [May. 2023] Paper accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IF: 14.255). [Link]
• [Sep. 2022] Paper accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IF: 10.8). [Link].
• [Aug. 2022] Joined MBZUAI. as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
• [Feb. 2022] Paper accepted for publication at CVPR 2022. [Link].
• [Jan. 2022] Joined ETRI as a Postdoctoral Researcher.
• [Jan. 2022] Obtained PhD from the University of Science and Technology (UST), South Korea.
• [Jan. 2022] Received the Outstanding Research Award from UST.
• [Oct. 2021] Moved to Zurich to join CVL in ETH Zurich as a Visiting Researcher.
• [Dec. 2020] Proposal accepted for a grant of 10 Million KRW by YSRP Program.
• [2020] Five Papers accepted in CVPR, ECCV, and SPL. [Link]

Students

• Anas Emad Addeen Diab Al-lahham
• Irzam Liaqat
• Khawar Islam
• Sahan Hemachandra
• Mubarak Gwaza Abdu-Aguye
• Salem Saqer Majid Almarri
• Nurbek Tastan
• Muhammad Saad Saeed
• Tu Vu Ngoc
• Jinha Lee