About Me

I am a second-year PhD student advised by Dr. Pinar Yanardag in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. I was recently honored as an MIT Rising Star (2025) for my research contributions in Generative AI. I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with high honors from Middle East Technical University in 2024.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Generative Modeling and Representation Learning. I focus on enhancing the quality, personalization, and interpretability of image and video generative models. My current work explores:

Physically Grounded Video Synthesis: Developing models that adhere to real-world physical constraints.
Identity & Character Consistency: Maintaining stable identities across generated frames and sequences.
Interpretability: Building frameworks like DiffEx (CVPR 2025) to provide diffusion-based explanations for classifiers.

Outside of my research, I am an avid reader. You can check out my reading updates and recommendation by connecting through Goodreads, I love to talk about books! Goodreads profile.

Publications

Diverse Video Generation with Determinantal Point Process-Guided Policy Optimization

Tahira Kazimi, Connor Dunlop, Pinar Yanardag

Preprint, 2025

arXiv Project Page

Explaining in Diffusion: Explaining a Classifier Through Hierarchical Semantics with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Tahira Kazimi, Ritika Allada, Pinar Yanardag

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025

arXiv Project Page

Audit & Repair: An Agentic Framework for Consistent Story Visualization in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Kiymet Akdemir*, Tahira Kazimi*, Pinar Yanardag

ICCV'25 MMRAgI

arXiv Project Page

Diverse Video Generation with Collaborative Agents

Tahira Kazimi, Heather Yu, Zhiqiang Lao.

IEEE CAI 2026, ICCV'25 MMRAgI

Latest News

[Jan 2026] One paper was accepted to IEEE CAI.

[Dec 2025] Best Intern Award for outstanding research contribution.

[Dec 2025] Diverse Video Generation with Determinantal Point Process-Guided Policy Optimization is available on arxiv.

[Nov 2025] I presented my research at MIT as a Rising Stars fellow

[Oct 2025] Two papers accepted to ICCV'25 MMRAgI workshop.

[June 2025] I presented DiffEx at CVPR 2025 in Nashville, TN.

[Feb 2025] DiffEx is accepted to CVPR'25!

[Aug 2024] I started my PhD at Virginia Tech

[June 2024] I graduated from METU with high honors.

Services

PC/Reviewer: CVPR, AAAI

Organizer: P13N: Personalization in Generative AI Workshop