Adeel Yousaf | University of Central Florida

About Me

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Central Florida (UCF), advised by Prof. Mubarak Shah. My research focuses on AI safety and alignment for multimodal foundation models, with an emphasis on improving safety while preserving utility and pretrained capabilities. I am particularly interested in identifying the right metrics for evaluating safety-aligned models: metrics that can reveal capability degradation that conventional benchmarks may overlook. My work spans vision–language models, multimodal reasoning models, and text-to-image diffusion models, and has been published at NeurIPS, ECCV, and AAAI.

I have also worked on funded research projects from DARPA and IARPA, spanning safety alignment of multimodal reasoning models and person re-identification. Earlier in my Ph.D., I worked on video understanding and action recognition.

Research Interests

AI Safety and Alignment of Multimodal Models
Vision–Language and Multimodal Reasoning Models
Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Robustness, Generalization, and Zero-Shot Learning
Video Understanding and Action Recognition

News

[Oct. 2026] Paper accepted to NeurIPS 2026 (First Author, Main Track).
[Jul. 2026] Served as a reviewer for the Trustworthy AI for Good (AI4GOOD) Workshop at ICML 2026.
[Jun. 2026] Paper accepted to ECCV 2026 (First Author, Main Track).
[Nov. 2025] Paper accepted to AAAI 2026 (First Author, Main Track).
[Aug. 2025] Paper accepted to ICCV 2025 Workshop (First Author, Oral Presentation).
[Jun. 2023] Paper accepted to IROS 2023 (Main Track).
[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

ECCV

The Illusion of High Utility in Safety Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Adeel Yousaf, Soumik Ghosh, James Beetham, Amrit Singh Bedi, Mubarak Shah

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026

PDF Code Video HF Model Project Page
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 Code HF Model HF Dataset Project Page
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

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023)

PDF Code Video 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
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2026
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026–2027
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, 2026
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