Research

Intelligence must adapt—without losing what matters.

My research asks how multimodal models can be adapted efficiently, how they can reason over diverse evidence, and how AI agents can act reliably as their tasks and environments change.

Research programme

Questions guiding my work

01

How can multimodal models adapt efficiently?

I develop parameter-efficient and semantically grounded methods that repurpose foundation models for new domains and tasks. This work spans visual prompting, machine unlearning, retrieval-guided adaptation, and lightweight model updates.

02

How can multimodal models reason reliably?

I study how models combine visual observations, language, and structured knowledge to reach grounded conclusions. This includes document-understanding systems that must trace answers to evidence and reason consistently across related forms.

03

How can AI agents earn trust?

I investigate agents that learn from interaction, adapt to changing tasks, expose evidence for their decisions, and preserve useful prior capabilities. The goal is dependable behaviour across the full lifetime of an agent.

Publications

Selected papers

Google Scholar ↗
2026

DIET: Machine Unlearning on a Data-Diet

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · Oral

A retain-data-free method for targeted unlearning in vision-language models, using hyperbolic geometry to remove concepts while preserving surrounding knowledge.

Nilakshan Kunananthaseelan, Jing Wu, Trung Le, Gholamreza Haffari, Mehrtash Harandi