Arman Akbari

PhD Candidate at Northeastern University · akbari.ar@northeastern.edu

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Everglades National Park, Miami

I am a second-year PhD candidate in Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, co-advised by Prof. Yanzhi Wang and Prof. Xuan Zhang. Before joining Northeastern, I received my B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Tehran.

My research spans two directions:

  • Physical AI, World Models, and World-Action Models — making these models efficient enough for real-time, real-world deployment.
  • Privacy-Preserving and Trustworthy Machine Learning — approaching trustworthy AI through the lens of efficiency and efficient AI.

Feel free to reach out via email if you’d like to discuss research or potential collaborations.

News

May 21, 2026 Our paper Cross-Platform Scaling of Vision-Language-Action Models from Edge to Cloud GPUs was accepted at GLSVLSI 2026.
Apr 01, 2026 I received my M.S. in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, with a concentration in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Algorithms (CVLA), along the way to my Ph.D.
Jan 26, 2026 CircuitSense (full version) got accepted in ICLR 2026!
Oct 17, 2025 CircuitSense got accepted in NeurIPS 2025 MATH-AI, The 5th Workshop on Mathematical Reasoning and AI and will be presented in San Diego Convention Center on December 6th.
Sep 30, 2025 We release our paper Beyond Overall Accuracy: Pose- and Occlusion-driven Fairness Analysis in Pedestrian Detection for Autonomous Driving on ArXiv.
Sep 29, 2025 We arxived CircuitSense and the hierarchical synthetic generation code.
Jul 13, 2025 Our paper VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting was accepted at ICANN 2026.
Sep 13, 2024 I am starting my PhD at Northeastern University.

Selected Publications

  1. arXiv
    Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models
    Arman Akbari, Ci Zhang, Arash Akbari, Lin Zhao, Yixiao Chen, Weiwei Chen, Xuan Zhang, Geng Yuan, and Yanzhi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.05254, 2026
    PDF Website
  2. arXiv
    ActQuant: Sub-4-bit Action-Guided Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models
    Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Masih Eskandar, Qitao Tan, Yixiao Chen, Jingwu Luo, Bertha Pangaribuan, Liyun Zhang, Jennifer Dy, Geng Yuan, Xue Lin, Gaowen Liu, Stratis Ioannidis, and Yanzhi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24011, 2025
    PDF Website
  3. arXiv
    PhyGround: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in Generative World Models
    Juyi Lin, Arash Akbari, Yumei He, Lin Zhao, Haichao Zhang, Arman Akbari, Xingchen Xu, Zoe Y. Lu, Enfu Nan, Hokin Deng, Edmund Yeh, Sarah Ostadabbas, Yun Fu, Jennifer Dy, Pu Zhao, and Yanzhi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.10806, 2025
    PDF Website
  4. ICLR
    CircuitSense: A Hierarchical Circuit System Benchmark Bridging Visual Comprehension and Symbolic Reasoning in Engineering Design Process
    Arman Akbari, Jian Gao, Yifei Zou, Mei Yang, Jinru Duan, Dmitrii Torbunov, Yanzhi Wang, Yihui Ren, and Xuan Zhang
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
    PDF Code
  5. ICANN
    VOTE: Vision-Language-Action Optimization with Trajectory Ensemble Voting
    Juyi Lin, Amir Taherin, Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Lei Lu, Guangyu Chen, Taskin Padir, Xiaomeng Yang, Weiwei Chen, Yiqian Li, Xue Lin, David Kaeli, Pu Zhao, and Yanzhi Wang
    In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN), 2026
    PDF Code
  6. ITSC
    Beyond Overall Accuracy: Pose- and Occlusion-driven Fairness Analysis in Pedestrian Detection for Autonomous Driving
    Mohammad Khoshkdahan, Arman Akbari, Arash Akbari, and Xuan Zhang
    In IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2025
    PDF
  7. ICEE
    A 2D Geometry Based Grasping Pose Generation Algorithm for a Two-Finger Robot Hand
    Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, and Mehdi Tale Masouleh
    In International Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE), 2023
    PDF