Adeel Yousaf | University of Central Florida

About Me

I am a Fulbright Ph.D. Scholar at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where I am advised by Dr. Mubarak Shah. My research focuses on Responsible AI (AI-Safety), specifically developing methods for NSFW content mitigation in vision–language and diffusion models. I have also worked on funded research projects, including IARPA’s BRIAR program, focusing on biometric recognition and person re-identification in large-scale, real-world settings. Feel free to reach out with questions or to discuss research!

Research Interests

AI Safety and NSFW Content Mitigation
Vision–Language Models
Robustness, Generalization, and Zero-Shot Learning
Video Understanding and Action Recognition

News

[Nov. 2025] SafeR-CLIP accepted to AAAI 2026 (Main Technical Track).
[Aug. 2025] ICCV 2025 Workshop paper accepted (Oral Presentation).
[Jun. 2023] Paper accepted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023).
[May 2022] Began research on the Biometric Recognition and Identification at Altitude and Range (BRIAR) program, funded by IARPA.
[Jan. 2022] Started Ph.D. at the University of Central Florida under Dr. Mubarak Shah; awarded the Fulbright Ph.D. Fellowship.

Publications

AAAI

SafeR-CLIP: Mitigating NSFW Content in Vision-Language Models While Preserving Pre-Trained Knowledge

Adeel Yousaf, Joseph Fioresi, James Beetham, Amrit Singh Bedi, Mubarak Shah

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026

PDF Project Page Main Track
ICCV

Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot Video Action Recognition via Visual-Textual Refinement and Improved Interpretability

Adeel Yousaf, Mubarak Shah

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshop, 2025

PDF Oral
IROS

EventTransAct: A Video Transformer-Based Framework for Event-Camera Based Action Recognition

Tristan de Blegiers, Ishan Dave, Adeel Yousaf, Mubarak Shah

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

PDF Project Page

Services

Conference Reviewer

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023–2026
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2023
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026

Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)

Mentoring & Teaching

Mentor, NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), 2024
Mentor, Fulbright Ph.D. Student Cohort, 2023
Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Central Florida
(Robot Vision; Introduction to Programming with C/C++)
Final Year Project Supervisor, Institute of Space Technology (IST), 2018–2021