Hi, I’m Hossein. I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Utah State University. I earned my Ph.D. from Clemson University under the supervision of Dr. Afghah. Before joining USU, I was a Research Associate in the IS-WiN Lab, where I worked on multimodal multi-task learning.
My research vision is to advance trustworthy, generalizable, and robust AI systems that can perceive, reason, and act reliably in complex, unseen, and adversarial real-world environments. My work spans different applications, including anomaly detection, biometrics, digital forensics, healthcare, autonomous driving, and scene understanding. My research experience includes collaborations with NASA, NIST, and CITeR, contributing to projects that connect theoretical AI advances with practical real-world applications.
I have authored more than 22 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in related areas, with publications in leading venues such as ICML, CVPR, SIGKDD, WACV, ICASSP, and ICIP. I have also served as a technical reviewer for more than 20 international journals and conferences, including IEEE TPAMI, TIP, TCSVT, TSMC, TMM, Pattern Recognition, Neurocomputing, Expert Systems with Applications, Computers in Biology and Medicine, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, WACV, ICIP, ICASSP, ICME, and IJCB.
Announcement: I am looking for highly motivated Ph.D., master’s, and undergraduate students to join my research group, VISTA Lab. If you are interested, please read this page and email me at hossein.kashiani@usu.edu with your CV, transcripts, and a brief statement describing your research interests and background.
News
- [2026/07]Joined Utah State University as an Assistant Professor.
- [2026/05]Took on a Research Associate position at Clemson University.
- [2026/05]Earned my Ph.D. from Clemson University (Class of 2026).
- [2026/05]Recognized as ICML 2026 Silver Reviewer.
- [2026/05]Hyper-ICL: Multimodal In-Context Learning has been accepted to ICML 2026.
- [2026/01]One paper on VLM-based anomaly detection has been accepted to ICASSP 2026.
- [2025/05]One paper on Vision-Language Models has been accepted at SIGKDD 2025.
- [2025/02]FreqDebias has been accepted at CVPR 2025.
- [2024/11]Two papers have been accepted at WACV 2025.
- [2024/11]Successfully passed Qualifying Exam.
- [2024/06]My new paper CATFace is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science.
- [2024/02]AAFACE is accepted at IEEE ICIP 2023.
- [2023/11]MedViT has been featured in Computers in Biology and Medicine.
- [2023/09]Our new method on Morph Attack Detection has been accepted by IJCB 2023.
- [2023/03]Our face morphing detector ranks among the top in NIST's Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT).
Research
Foundation Models for Perception, Reasoning, and Action
More details
This direction develops VLMs and MLLMs for robust perception, efficient adaptation, and trustworthy deployment, including multimodal in-context learning, prompt learning, test-time adaptation, and evidence-grounded and uncertainty-aware reasoning. Representative works include Hyper-ICL, DiSa, and Style-Pro.
Future directions include memory-augmented VLMs for long-horizon reasoning, physical-space reasoning, vision-language-action foundation models, closed-loop multimodal systems, test-time multimodal adaptation, and continual multimodal learning.
Trustworthy AI
More details
This direction develops machine learning and multimodal AI techniques to safeguard identity and digital trust, advance long-range biometric recognition, and address multimodal safety, hallucination reduction, fairness-aware and privacy-preserving learning, and adversarial robustness.
AI for Healthcare, Manufacturing & Autonomous Driving
More details
This direction leverages machine learning and multimodal AI to address critical challenges in healthcare, including MedViT for robust medical imaging; advanced manufacturing, including ROADS and PromptMAD for industrial anomaly detection and quality control; and autonomous driving, including robust perception, tracking, multi-teacher knowledge distillation, and risk-aware driving policies.
Publications






Summary
We propose a robust multi-class anomaly detection framework with a class-aware prompt integration mechanism to mitigate inter-class interference and a domain adapter to handle domain shifts.


Summary
This study proposes a robust and efficient CNN-Transformer hybrid model, combining CNN locality with the global connectivity of vision Transformers. Additionally, we enhance robustness by learning smoother decision boundaries through feature mean and variance permutation within mini-batches.






Summary
We propose a two-phase multi-expert classification method for human action recognition, addressing long-tailed distribution using super-class learning without extra data or manual annotation. A novel Graph-Based Class Selection (GCS) algorithm optimizes class configurations and inter-class dependencies.

Summary
We address the generalization issues in scene understanding for autonomous vehicles by employing GANs for weather modeling, and advanced augmentations, improving object detection robustness and generalization across domains, especially in adverse weather conditions and natural distortions.



Summary
This work aims to improve motion and observation models in visual object tracking. We propose a motion estimation network to refine target location predictions, with a Siamese network detecting the most probable candidate. Additionally, a weighting CNN adaptively assigns weights to similarity scores, accounting for target appearance changes.

Talks
Best of WACV 2025
Face Morphing Attack Detection
Unlocking Visual Anomaly Detection with Vision-Language Models
Toward Reliable Generalization in Real-World AI Systems
Academic Service
Program Committee
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
- ACM SIGIR 2026 Workshop SynthIR
Conference Reviewer
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
- IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
- IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB)
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
- International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
- International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
Journal Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
- IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
- IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (TSMC)
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
- IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
- IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
- IEEE Access
- Pattern Recognition, Elsevier
- Neurocomputing, Elsevier
- Expert Systems with Applications, Elsevier
- Knowledge-Based Systems, Elsevier
- Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Elsevier
- Computers in Biology and Medicine, Elsevier
- International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology, Elsevier
Review records available at Web of Science.