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

Developing foundation models that support robust perception, adaptive reasoning, memory, uncertainty, and continual learning.
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

Building large-scale intelligent systems that are robust, efficient, and interpretable for real-world deployment.
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

Applying AI innovations to solve real-world challenges in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, autonomous driving, and beyond.
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

Hyper-ICL overview
Hyper-ICL: Attention Calibration with Hyperbolic Anchor Distillation for Multimodal In-Context Learning
NA Talemi, H Kashiani, F Afghah
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
PromptMAD overview
PromptMAD: Cross-Modal Prompting for Multi-Class Visual Anomaly Localization
D McCain, H Kashiani, F Afghah
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2026
FreqDebias overview
FreqDebias: Towards Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Consistency-Driven Frequency Debiasing
H Kashiani, NA Talemi, F Afghah
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
DiSa overview
DiSa: Directional Saliency-Aware Prompt Learning for Generalizable Vision-Language Models
NA Talemi, H Kashiani, HR Nowdeh, F Afghah
Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025
Style-Pro overview
Style-Pro: Style-Guided Prompt Learning for Generalizable Vision-Language Models
NA Talemi, H Kashiani, F Afghah
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025
ROADS overview
ROADS: Robust Prompt-driven Multi-Class Anomaly Detection under Domain Shift
H Kashiani, NA Talemi, F Afghah
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025
CATFace overview
CATFace: Cross-Attribute-Guided Transformer With Self-Attention Distillation for Low-Quality Face Recognition
NA Talemi, H Kashiani, NM Nasrabadi
IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, 2024
MedViT overview
MedViT: A Robust Vision Transformer for Generalized Medical Image Classification
ON Manzari, H Ahmadabadi, H Kashiani, SB Shokouhi, A Ayatollahi
Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2023
AAFACE overview
AAFACE: Attribute-aware Attentional Network for Face Recognition
NA Talemi, H Kashiani, and 4 more authors
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2023
Morph attack detection overview
Towards Generalizable Morph Attack Detection with Consistency Regularization
H Kashiani, NA Talemi, NM Nasrabadi
IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB), 2023
Face image quality vector overview
Face Image Quality Vector Assessment for Biometrics Applications
N Najafzadeh, H Kashiani, and 4 more authors
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2023
Robust ensemble morph detection overview
Robust Ensemble Morph Detection with Domain Generalization
H Kashiani, SM Sami, S Soleymani, NM Nasrabadi
IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB), 2022
Robust transformer overview
Robust Transformer with Locality Inductive Bias and Feature Normalization
ON Manzari, H Kashiani, HA Dehkordi, SB Shokouhi
Engineering Science and Technology, 2022
Human action recognition overview
Multi-expert Human Action Recognition with Hierarchical Super-class Learning
HA Dehkordi, AS Nezhad, H Kashiani, SB Shokouhi, A Ayatollahi
Knowledge-Based Systems, 2022
Generalizing object detectors overview
Generalizing State-of-the-art Object Detectors for Autonomous Vehicles in Unseen Environments
A Khosravian, A Amirkhani, H Kashiani, M Masih-Tehrani
Expert Systems with Applications, 2021
COVID-19 detection overview
Lightweight Local Transformer for COVID-19 Detection Using Chest CT Scans
HA Dehkordi, H Kashiani, AAH Imani, SB Shokouhi
International Conference on Computer Engineering and Knowledge, 2021
Semantic segmentation overview
Robust Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation
A Amirkhani, A Khosravian, M Masih-Tehrani, H Kashiani
IEEE Access, 2021
Visual object tracking overview
Visual Object Tracking Based on Adaptive Siamese and Motion Estimation Network
Hossein Kashiani, Shahriar B Shokouhi
Image and Vision Computing, 2019
Patchwise object tracking overview
Patchwise Object Tracking via Structural Local Sparse Appearance Model
Hossein Kashiani, Shahriar B Shokouhi
International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering, 2017

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

Conference Reviewer

Journal Reviewer

Review records available at Web of Science.