About Me

I am a third-year PhD student in GEMLAB 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 lies at the intersection of generative modeling and representation learning, where I work to improve the quality, diversity, and interpretability of image and video generation, spanning physically grounded video synthesis (NeurIPS 2026), intra-class diversity that preserves prompt alignment (CVPR 2026), and diffusion-based explanations for classifiers (CVPR 2025).

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

NeurIPS 2026

HiPhy: Hierarchical Alignment for Physically-Plausible Multi-Principle Video Generation

Tahira Kazimi, Shubhankar Borse, Munawar Hayat, Fatih Porikli, Pinar Yanardag

arXiv Project Page

CVPR 2026

Diverse Video Generation with Determinantal Point Process-Guided Policy Optimization

Tahira Kazimi, Connor Dunlop, Pinar Yanardag

arXiv Project Page

CVPR 2025

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

Tahira Kazimi, Ritika Allada, Pinar Yanardag

arXiv Project Page

ICCV'25 MMRAgI

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

Kiymet Akdemir*, Tahira Kazimi*, Pinar Yanardag

arXiv Project Page

IEEE CAI 2026 · ICCV'25 MMRAgI

Diverse Video Generation with Collaborative Agents

Tahira Kazimi, Heather Yu, Zhiqiang Lao

Latest News

Sep 2026My first-author paper on physically plausible video generation is accepted to NeurIPS 2026.

Apr 2026I will be joining Apple as a Machine Learning intern on the Media Intelligence Team.

Feb 2026My first-author work on diverse video generation is accepted to CVPR 2026.

Jan 2026One paper was accepted to IEEE CAI.

Dec 2025Best Intern Award for outstanding research contribution.

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

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

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

Jun 2025I presented DiffEx at CVPR 2025 in Nashville, TN.

Feb 2025DiffEx is accepted to CVPR'25!

Aug 2024I started my PhD at Virginia Tech.

Jun 2024I graduated from METU with high honors.

Services

ReviewerCVPR, AAAI

OrganizerP13N: Personalization in Generative AI Workshop