Muhammad Aqeel

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Engineering for Innovation Medicine · University of Verona, Italy

Anomaly detection·Unsupervised learning·Vision-language models·Generative models

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My research is centered on anomaly detection for industrial inspection, with a focus on unsupervised and zero-shot settings where labeled defect data is unavailable. Over time my work has expanded toward generative models and vision–language approaches, motivated by the need to handle data scarcity and improve generalization across unseen defect categories.

Recently I have also been exploring video understanding and multimodal summarization, though anomaly detection remains my primary focus. I completed my PhD at the University of Verona under Francesco Setti and Marco Cristani, and earned my Master's at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications under Xiaohong Liu.

News

Apr 2026 AVA-DINO accepted at ICIP 2026.
Mar 2026 ClipSum accepted at ICPR 2026.
Mar 2026 Started as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Verona.
Feb 2026 Successfully defended my PhD at the University of Verona.

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Selected publications

CoMet

Towards Real Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Via Confident Meta-Learning

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICCV 2025·PDF·Code

AVA-DINO

Anomaly-Aware Vision-Language Adapters for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Uzair Khan, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICIP 2026

ClipSum

Multimodal Abstractive Summarization of Instructional Videos with Vision-Language Models

Maham Nazir, Richong Zhang, Muhammad Aqeel, Francesco Setti

ICPR 2026

RAD

Robust Anomaly Detection in Industrial Environments via Meta-Learning

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICCV 2025 Workshops (Oral)·PDF

Semantic Parsing

Semantic Parsing for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Muhammad Aqeel, Francesco Setti

IEEE Access 2025·PDF

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Publications

See also Google Scholar for citation metrics.

2026

[1]

Anomaly-Aware Vision-Language Adapters for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Uzair Khan, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICIP 2026
[2]

Multimodal Abstractive Summarization of Instructional Videos with Vision-Language Models

Maham Nazir, Richong Zhang, Muhammad Aqeel, Francesco Setti

ICPR 2026

2025

[3]

Semantic Parsing for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Muhammad Aqeel, Francesco Setti

IEEE Access 2025 PDF
[4]

Towards Real Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Via Confident Meta-Learning

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICCV 2025 PDF·Code
[5]

A Contrastive Learning-Guided Confident Meta-learning for Zero Shot Anomaly Detection

Muhammad Aqeel, Danijel Skocaj, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICCV 2025 Workshops Oral PDF
[6]

Robust Anomaly Detection in Industrial Environments via Meta-Learning

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ICCV 2025 Workshops Oral PDF
[7]

Diffusion-Based Data Augmentation for Medical Image Segmentation

Maham Nazir, Muhammad Aqeel, Francesco Setti

ICCV 2025 Workshops PDF
[8]

RoadFusion: Latent Diffusion Model for Pavement Defect Detection

Muhammad Aqeel, Kidus Dagnaw Bellete, Francesco Setti

ICIAP 2025 Oral PDF
[9]

ExDD: Explicit Dual Distribution Learning for Surface Defect Detection via Diffusion Synthesis

Muhammad Aqeel, Federico Leonardi, Francesco Setti

ICIAP 2025 PDF
[10]

Latent Space Synergy: Text-Guided Data Augmentation for Direct Diffusion Biomedical Segmentation

Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Zanxi Ruan, Francesco Setti

ICIAP 2025 Workshops PDF
[11]

Self-Supervised Iterative Refinement for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Quality Control

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

VISAPP 2025 Oral PDF

2024

[12]

Meta Learning-Driven Iterative Refinement for Robust Anomaly Detection in Industrial Inspection

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

ECCV 2024 Workshops Oral PDF
[13]

Self-supervised Learning for Robust Surface Defect Detection

Muhammad Aqeel, Shakiba Sharifi, Marco Cristani, Francesco Setti

DeLTA 2024 Oral PDF
[14]

Diffusion-based Image Generation for In-distribution Data Augmentation in Surface Defect Detection

Luigi Capogrosso, Federico Girella, Francesco Taioli, Michele Dalla Chiara, Muhammad Aqeel, Franco Fummi, Francesco Setti, Marco Cristani

VISAPP 2024 PDF·Code

News

A timeline of recent updates, paper acceptances, talks, and milestones.

2026

Apr 2026 AVA-DINO accepted at ICIP 2026 — Anomaly-Aware Vision-Language Adapters for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection.
Mar 2026 ClipSum accepted at ICPR 2026 — Multimodal Abstractive Summarization of Instructional Videos.
Mar 2026 Started as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Verona.
Feb 2026 Successfully defended my PhD at the University of Verona.

2025

Jul 2025 CoMet accepted at ICCV 2025; two more papers accepted at ICCV 2025 Workshops (both Oral).
Jun 2025 Started a 6-month research stay at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

2024

Sep 2024 Paper accepted at ECCV 2024 Workshops (Oral).
Jul 2024 Paper accepted at DeLTA 2024 (Oral).

2022

Dec 2022 Started PhD in Computer Science at the University of Verona, Italy.

2019 – 2021

Jun 2021 Graduated with Master's in Computer Science from BUPT, Beijing.
Sep 2019 Started Master's in Computer Science at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China (CSC scholarship).

Grants

Funded research projects and scholarships.

2022 – 2025

PNRR PhD Scholarship

Italian Ministry of University and Research, via University of Verona

Role: PhD Fellow · National Recovery and Resilience Plan funding for doctoral research on industrial anomaly detection.

June 2025 – November 2025

Mobility Research Grant

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Role: Visiting Researcher · Six-month research stay collaborating with Prof. Danijel Skočaj's group on zero-shot anomaly detection.

2019 – 2021

Chinese Government Scholarship (CSC)

China Scholarship Council, via Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Role: Scholarship Recipient · Supported MSc research on natural language processing.

Career

Education

2022 – 2026

Ph.D. in Computer SciencePhD

University of Verona, Italy

Supervisors: Prof. Francesco Setti & Prof. Marco Cristani · Anomaly detection for industrial manufacturing

2019 – 2021

M.Sc. in Computer ScienceMSc

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

Supervisor: Prof. Xiaohong Liu · Natural language processing and sentiment analysis

2013 – 2017

Experience

2026 – present

Postdoctoral Research FellowPostdoc

University of Verona, Italy

June 2025 – November 2025

Visiting ResearcherVisiting

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

2023 – 2025

Teaching AssistantTeaching

University of Verona, Italy

Computer Vision and Machine Learning, Department of Engineering for Innovation Medicine

2021 – 2022

Research AssistantResearch

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

2017 – 2019

Industry RolesIndustry

Pakistan

Software Quality Assurance Engineer at UIIT, Arid Agriculture University · Earlier, Software Developer at eConceptions (Pvt) Ltd.