Hi, I'm Akhtar

Postdoc. Researcher (CV & ML)
MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates

its<dot>akhtar90<at>gmail<dot>com
akhtar<dot>munir<at>mbzuai<dot>ac<dot>ae

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Vision at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi. My research spans areas like Domain Adaptation, Uncertainty Estimation, Model Calibration, and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Currently, I am focused on tackling challenges in Model Calibration, enhancing the accuracy of Weather Modeling, and improving Remote Sensing analysis through VLMs.

Advisors: Dr. Salman Khan, Dr. Fahad S Khan.

Publications (Selected)

Akashah Shabbir*, Muhammad Akhtar Munir*, Akshay Dudhane*, Muhammad Umer Sheikh, Muhammad Haris Khan, Paolo Fraccaro, Juan Bernabe Moreno, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan.

"ThinkGeo: Evaluating Tool-Augmented Agents for Remote Sensing Tasks". In arXiv (2025). *Equally contributing first authors.

[Paper] [Code]

Ashshak Sharifdeen, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Sanoojan Baliah, Salman Khan, and Muhammad Haris Khan.

"O-TPT: Orthogonality Constraints for Calibrating Test-time Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models". In CVPR (2025) as Highlight.

[Paper] [Code]

Sagar Soni, Akshay Dudhane, Hiyam Debary, Mustansar Fiaz, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Sohail Danish, Paolo Fraccaro, Campbell D Watson, Levente J Klein, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan.

"EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues". In CVPR (2025).

[Paper] [Code]

Muhamad Sohail Danish*, Muhammad Akhtar Munir*, Syed Roshaan Ali Shah, Kartik Kuckreja, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Paolo Fraccaro, Alexandre Lacoste, and Salman Khan.

"GEOBench-VLM: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Geospatial Tasks". In arXiv (2025). *Equally contributing first authors.

[Paper] [Code]

Vishal Nedungadi, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Marc Rußwurm, Ron Sarafian, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Yinon Rudich, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, and Salman Khan.

AirCast: Improving Air Pollution Forecasting Through Multi-Variable Data Alignment". In arXiv (2025).

[Paper] [Code]

Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, and Salman Khan.

"Efficient Localized Adaptation of Neural Weather Forecasting: A Case Study in the MENA Region". In CCAI-NeurIPS (2024).

[Paper] [Code]

Sohail Danish, Muhammad Haris Khan, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Saquib Sarfraz, and Mohsen Ali.

"Improving Single Domain-Generalized Object Detection: A Focus on Diversification and Alignment". In CVPR (2024).

[Paper] [Code]

Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Salman Khan, Muhammad Haris Khan, Mohsen Ali, and Fahad Shahbaz Khan.

"Cal-DETR: Calibrated Detection Transformer". In NeurIPS (2023).

[Paper] [Code]

Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Haris Khan, Muhammad Saquib Sarfraz, and Mohsen Ali.

"Domain Adaptive Object Detection via Balancing between Self-Training and Adversarial Learning". In IEEE TPAMI (2023).

[Paper] [Project Page]

Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Haris Khan, Salman Khan, and Fahad Shahbaz Khan.

"Bridging Precision and Confidence: A Train-Time Loss for Calibrating Object Detection". In CVPR (2023).

[Paper] [Code]

Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Haris Khan, Muhammad Saquib Sarfraz, and Mohsen Ali.

"Towards Improving Calibration in Object Detection under Domain Shift". In NeurIPS (2022).

[Paper] [Code]

Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Muhammad Haris Khan, Muhammad Saquib Sarfraz, and Mohsen Ali.

"SSAL: Synergizing between Self-Training and Adversarial Learning for Domain Adaptive Object Detection". In NeurIPS (2021).

[Paper] [Project Page]

Services & Honors

Reviewer: CVPR 2023-2025, ICLR 2024-2025, ICCV 2023-2025, NeurIPS 2023-2025
Outstanding Reviewer: Recognized as Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2025
Awardee: NeurIPS 2022 & 2023 Scholar Award, CVPR 2023 DEI Award
Scholarship: PhD Fellowship, from Information Technology University
Conferences (Attended): CVPR 2023, NeurIPS 2023, CVPR 2024, BMVC 2024
Attended as participant in BMVC Doctoral Consortium

Experience

Research Associate, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Duration: Jul 2023 – Present
- Advisors: Dr. Salman Khan, Dr. Fahad S Khan
Research Intern, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Duration: Aug 2022 – Jun 2023
- Advisors: Dr. Salman Khan, Dr. Fahad S Khan
Fellowship (4 Years) & Research Associate, Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore, Pakistan
- Duration: Sep 2017 – Jul 2022
- Advisor: Dr. Mohsen Ali
Lab Engineer, School of EE and CS (SEECS), NUST, Islamabad, Pakistan
- Duration: Nov 2013 – Sep 2017

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Download CV as PDF: Download CV