About Me

I am a PhD candidate in Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, supervised by Prof. Christopher Leckie, Prof. Sarah M. Erfani, and Dr. Hanxun Huang. My research focuses on trustworthy AI, with an emphasis on robustness, fairness, adversarial reliability, and hallucination detection in vision-language models.

I am particularly interested in understanding how multimodal models fail under distribution shifts, spurious correlations, adversarial perturbations, and visually unsupported generation, and in developing practical methods to improve their reliability.

News

  • August 2026 "VisER: Visual Evidence and Reliance for Object Hallucination Detection in LVLMs" accepted at EMNLP 2026.
  • July 2026 Selected as one of 16 doctoral students for the Optiver PhD Quant Lab 2026.
  • June 2026 “GeoDetect: Geometric Adversarial Detection for VLPs” accepted at ECCV 2026.
  • June 2026 Awarded Women in Machine Learning travel funding and an FEIT travel scholarship.
  • May 2026 “Density-Aware Translation of Spurious Correlations in Zero-Shot VLMs” accepted at ICML 2026.

Education

Selected Publications

EMNLP 2026

VisER: Visual Evidence and Reliance for Object Hallucination Detection in LVLMs

Afsaneh Hasanebrahimi, Hanxun Huang, Christopher Leckie, and Sarah Erfani.

In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026.

ECCV 2026

GeoDetect: Geometric Adversarial Detection for VLPs

Afsaneh Hasanebrahimi, Hanxun Huang, Christopher Leckie, James Bailey, and Sarah Erfani.

In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026. [paper] [code]

ICML 2026

Density-Aware Translation of Spurious Correlations in Zero-Shot VLMs

Afsaneh Hasanebrahimi, Hanxun Huang, Christopher Leckie, and Sarah Erfani.

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026. [paper] [code]

ICCKE 2023

Density Estimation Helps Adversarial Robustness

Afsaneh Hasanebrahimi, B. K. Baghbaderani, R. Hosseini, and A. Kalhor.

In International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE), 2023. [paper]

ICCKE 2023

Adversarial Robustness Evaluation with Separation Index

B. K. Baghbaderani, Afsaneh Hasanebrahimi, A. Kalhor, and R. Hosseini.

In International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE), 2023. [paper]

Experience

Graduate Researcher Academic Associate / Head Tutor, Statistical ML

University of Melbourne, Jul. 2025–Present

PhD Graduate Researcher

University of Melbourne, Feb. 2024–Present

PhD Quant Focus

Optiver, Sydney, July 2026

Data Scientist, Strategy Team

SnappFood, 2023–2024

Talks

Bias and Fairness in Vision-Language Models

ADM+S 2025 Symposium, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, July 2025.

The Importance of Adversarial Robustness in Vision-Language Models

ADM+S 2024 Symposium, University of New South Wales, Sydney, October 2024. [LINK]

Honours & Awards

  • Women in Machine Learning travel funding, 2026
  • FEIT Engineering & IT travel scholarship, 2026
  • L’Oréal–UNESCO For Women in Science Mentoring Scheme, 2025
  • Melbourne Research Scholarship, 2024