Hanan Gani

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student and a Powell Fellow in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) advised by Prof. Manmohan Chandraker. I am also the recipient of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering Fellowship. My research focuses on the intersection of Multi-modal Learning, Generative AI and Embodied Intelligence. I also hold a research appointment at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

Before joining UCSD, I earned my Master’s degree in Machine Learning at MBZUAI where I was part of the Intelligent Visual Analytics Lab (IVAL), advised by Prof. Salman Khan and co-advised by Prof. Fahad Khan. I was also fortunate to be advised and mentored by Prof. Muzammal Naseer. I also spent time as a visiting student with Prof. Peter Wonka at KAUST.

University of California, San Diego
(2025-Present)

MBZUAI
(2021-Present)

KAUST
(2023)

Samsung
(2018-2021)

NIT Srinagar
(2014-2018)

Research Interests

My research focuses on developing multimodal AI systems that seamlessly integrate reasoning, generative modeling, and embodied intelligence.

News

• [Sept. 2025] Embarked my PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
• [Sept. 2025] Achieved 2nd place in research track at UC Berkeley’s AgentX challenge.
• [June. 2025] Our paper titled “Aurelia: Test-time Reasoning Distillation in Audio-Visual LLMs” is accepted at ICCV 2025.
• [March. 2025] Our paper titled “VideoGLaMM: A Large Multimodal Model for Pixel-Level Visual Grounding in Videos” got accepted at CVPR 2025.
• [Jan. 2025] Our paper titled “VANE-Bench: Video Anomaly Evaluation Benchmark for Conversational LMMs” got accepted at NAACL 2025.
• [Nov. 2024] One paper accepted at COLING 2025.
• [Oct. 2024] One paper accepted at IEEE/CVF WACV 2025.
• [June. 2024] Our paper “MedContext: Learning Contextual Cues for Efficient Volumetric Medical Segmentation” got accepted at MICCAI 2024.
• [June. 2024] One paper accepted at IEEE ICIP 2024.
• [March. 2024] Awarded ICLR 2024 Travel Grant.
• [Jan. 2024] Our paper “LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts” got accepted at ICLR 2024.
• [Oct. 2023] Awarded NeurIPS 2023 Travel Grant.
• [Sept. 2023] Our paper “Align your Prompts: Test-Time Prompting with Distribution Alignment for Zero-Shot Generalization” got accepted at NeurIPS 2023.
• [June. 2023] Joined Visual Computing Center (VCC) at KAUST as a Visiting Student under Professor Peter Wonka.
• [Jan. 2023] Our US patent about training Vision Transformers on small-scale datasets got approved for filing.

Publications

Patents

Academic Services

Conference Reviewing

• Served as a Reviewer at ICLR’25, 24 & 23, AAAI’24, NeurIPS’24 & 23, ECCV’24, CVPR’24, ICML’24, WACV’24, ICCV’23

Teaching Assistant

• Vision-Language Foundational Models (CV806) course - Spring 2024 with Prof. Ivan Laptev
• Deep Learning (AI702) course - Spring 2024 with Prof. Haris Khan
• Statistical Inference and Causality (ML703) course - Fall 2023 with Prof. Kun Zhang
• Machine Learning (ML701) course - Fall 2023 with Prof. Samuel Horvath

Conference Volunteering

• Program Volunteer - IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Abu Dhabi

Invited Talks

• (May 2025) Delivered a talk on “Latest Trends in AI” at CS department, Abu Dhabi University
• (June 2024) Presented a talk on “Generative AI” to undergrad CS students at the University of Jordon

Awards and Merits

• Awarded CVPR 2025 Travel Grant.
• Awarded ICLR 2024 Travel Grant.
• Awarded NeurIPS 2023 Travel Grant.
• Full scholarship to study Masters in Machine Learning at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).
• Selected as Predoctoral fellow at Fatima Fellowship under Dr. Abubakr Abid.
• Harman Star Excellence award from the Harman International India (Regional) Head.
• Merit Based Scholarship granted for undergraduate studies by Ministry of Minority Affairs, India.
• Secured 80th state rank in IIT-JEE Mains 2014 (among top 1% of 1.5 million students across the country).

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