About me

I’m currently a researcher at Apple, working on multimodal foundation models and generative modeling.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, where I was advised by Prof. Adriana Kovashka. My research focuses on multimodal representation learning, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and text-to-image generative models, with the broader goal of building AI systems that can generalize beyond their training distributions and reliably understand and generate complex visual content especially under resource and data constraints. My dissertation committee included Prof. Milos Hauskrecht, Prof. Xiang Lorraine Li, and Prof. Boqing Gong, and I was fortunate to collaborate with Prof. Deepti Ghadiyaram.

In particular, I study compositional generalization, robustness, and cultural understanding. My work investigates how multimodal models generalize to new domains, geographic and cultural distributions, and novel or rare combinations of objects, attributes, and relations. I am especially interested in building models that remain effective in diverse, low-resource, and data-constrained settings.

During my Ph.D., I interned at Apple, eBay, and Amazon, working on problems spanning computer vision, multimodal learning, and Vision-Language Models. Prior to that, I received my B.S. in Software Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, where I was recognized as an Outstanding Student. I also spent time at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as a research intern.

My research has appeared at venues including ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR, WACV, and BMVC, and broadly spans:

• Robustness & Domain Generalization
  How to leverage multimodal data to learn semantically rich robust representation that generalize beyond their training distribution, including robustness to domain shift, geographic variation, and real-world data diversity [Language-Guided Feature Alignment, GeoKnowledgePrompting, MuST]

• Compositionality
  How models can generalize to novel and rare (e.g. creative) combinations of concepts (e.g., new objects, relations, attributes) and compositional reasoning [ReBind, PersuasiveAdVLMBenchmark]

• Cultural Understanding
  How Vision-Language and Text-to-Image generative models understand and represent cultural concepts (e.g., objects, social activities and human interactions) across diverse cultures and especially low-resource countries [AHEaD,GeoKnowledgePrompting]

Feel free to reach me at sem238 [AT] pitt [DOT] edu or siinamalakouti [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Good News!

• [07.2026] Received Outstanding Reviewer award from ECCV’26
• [04.2026] I’ll be co-organizing workhshop on Visual Persuasion at ECCV 2026!
• [04.2026] I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation! I’m deeply grateful to my advisor, committee members, collaborators, family, and friends for their support throughout this journey.
• [03.2026] Received ICLR’26 Travel Award
• [01.2026] Paper accepted to ICLR’26
• [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.