About me
I’m a final-year Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, advised by Prof. Adriana Kovashka.
My research interests are computer vision, multimodal learning, and foundational models (understanding and generative), aiming to build robust and generalizable systems that can understand and reason about complex visual data. During my Ph.D., I have interned at Apple, eBay, and Amazon. Prior to that, I received my B.S. in Software Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, where I received an outstanding student award and visited Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz as a research intern.
I’m currently working on the following problems, with research appearing in NeurIPS’25, CVPR’24, WACV’25, and BMVC’23:
- Multimodal & abstract Reasoning: Multimodal Reasoning, compositional reasoning, and Diffusion Models.
- Domain Robustness: Multimodal domain generalization, generalization across geographies, etc.
- Generative AI: text-to-image, compositional generaiton and generalization.
I’m currently on the job market and seeking research/applied research positions in both industry and academia (postdoc).
Feel free to reach me at sem238 [AT] pitt [DOT] edu or siinamalakouti [AT] gmail [DOT] com
Good News!
[10.2025] Received NeurIPS’25 Scholar Award
[09.2025] Paper accepted to NeurIPS’25
[09.2025] Presenting Role Bias in Diffusion Models: Diagnosing and Mitigating through Intermediate Decomposition as an oral at CDEL Workshop, ICCV 2025
- [05.2025] Passed Ph.D. Proposal Exam on Compositional and Cultural Generalization in Discriminative and Generative Vision Foundational Models. Thanks to my amazing advisor, Dr. Adriana Kovashka, and my committee: Dr. Milos Hausckrecht, Dr. Xiang Lorraine Li, and Dr. Boqing Gong
[02.2025] Co-organizing Demographic Diversity in Computer Vision workshop at CVPR 2025
- [01.2025] I’ll be participating in WACV 2025 Doctoral Consortium
- [10.2024] A paper accepted to WACV’25 in Tucson,AZ.
- [09.2024] Received Outstanding Reviewer award from ECCV’24
- [Summer’24] Joined Prime Video at Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern in New York, NY.
- [04.2024] A Paper accepted to CVPR’24
- [04.2024] I passed my Oral Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam!
- [08.2023] A paper accepted to BMVC’23
- [Summer’23] Joined eBay as an Applied Research Intern in San Jose, CA.
- [Summer’22] Joined Apple as a Computer Vision Intern in Cupertino, CA.