VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Mohammad Reza Taesiri
dblp:303/0458
· DBLP profile ↗
11ranked-venue papers
7as first author
11since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-8229-0325ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 5 first-author · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Understanding Generative AI Capabilities in Everyday Image Editing TasksabstractGenerative AI (GenAI) holds significant promise for automating everyday image editing tasks, especially following the recent release of GPT-4o on March 25, 2025. However, what subjects do people most often want edited? What kinds of editing actions do they want to perform (e.g., removing or stylizing the subject)? Do people prefer precise edits with predictable outcomes, or highly creative ones? By understanding the characteristics of real-world requests and the corresponding edits made by freelance photo-editing wizards, can we draw lessons for improving AI-based editors and determine which types of requests can currently be handled successfully by AI editors? In this paper, we present a unique study addressing these questions by analyzing 83k requests with their associated 305k edits from the recent 12 years on the /r/PhotoshopRequest Reddit community. According to human ratings, approximately only 33% of requests can be fulfilled by the best AI editors (including , , ). Interestingly, AI editors perform worse on low-creativity requests that require precise editing than on more open-ended requests. They often struggle to preserve the identity of people and animals, and frequently make non-requested touch-ups. On the other side of the table, VLM judges (e.g., o1) perform differently than human judges and may prefer AI edits over human edits. Code and qualitative examples are available at: https://psrdataset.github.io/. Brandon Collins, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Logan Bolton, Viet Dac Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Anh Totti Nguyen |
WACV | 2 |
| 2025 | B-score: Detecting biases in large language models using response historyabstractLarge language models (LLMs) often exhibit strong biases, e.g, against women or in favor of the number 7. We investigate whether LLMs would be able to output less biased answers when allowed to observe their prior answers to the same question in a multi-turn conversation. To understand which types of questions invite more biased answers, we test LLMs on our proposed set of questions that span 9 topics and belong to three types: (1) Subjective; (2) Random; and (3) Objective. Interestingly, LLMs are able to "de-bias" themselves in a multi-turn conversation in response to questions that seek a Random, unbiased answer. Furthermore, we propose B-score, a novel metric that is effective in detecting biases in Subjective, Random, Easy, and Hard questions. On MMLU, HLE, and CSQA, leveraging B-score substantially improves the verification accuracy of LLM answers (i.e, accepting LLM correct answers and rejecting incorrect ones) compared to using verbalized confidence scores or the frequency of single-turn answers alone. Code and data are available at: b-score.github.io. An Vo, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Daeyoung Kim 0001, Anh Totti Nguyen |
ICML | 2 |
| 2025 | VideoGameQA-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Video Game Quality AssuranceabstractWith video games leading in entertainment revenues, optimizing game development workflows is critical to the industry’s long-term success. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) hold significant potential to automate and enhance various aspects of game development—particularly video game quality assurance (QA), which remains one of the most labor-intensive processes with limited automation. To effectively measure VLM performance in video game QA tasks and evaluate their ability to handle real-world scenarios, there is a clear need for standardized benchmarks, as current ones fall short in addressing this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoGameQA-Bench - a comprehensive benchmark designed to encompass a wide range of game QA activities, including visual unit testing, visual regression testing, needle-in-a-haystack, glitch detection, and bug report generation for both images and videos. Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Abhijay Ghildyal, Saman Zad Tootaghaj, Nabajeet Barman, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2025 | Videogamebunny: Towards Vision Assistants for Video GamesabstractLarge multimodal models (LMMs) hold substantial promise across various domains, from personal assistance in daily tasks to sophisticated applications like medical diagnostics. However, their capabilities have limitations in the video game domain, such as challenges with scene understanding, hallucinations, and inaccurate descriptions of video game content, especially in open-source models. This paper describes the development of VideoGameBunny,a LLaVA-style model based on Bunny, specifically tailored for understanding images from video games. We release intermediate checkpoints, training logs, and an extensive dataset comprising 185,259 video game images from 413 titles, along with 389,565 image-instruction pairs that include image captions, question-answer pairs, and a JSON representation of 16 elements of 136,974 images. Our experiments show that our high quality game-related data has the potential to make a relatively small model outperform the much larger state-of-the-art model LLaVa-1.6-34b (which has more than 4x the number of parameters). Our study paves the way for future research in video game understanding on tasks such as playing, commentary, and debugging. Code and data are available at: https://videogamebunny.github.io/ Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
WACV | 1 |
| 2024 | Vision Language Models are blind 🕶
Pooyan Rahmanzadehgervi, Logan Bolton, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Anh Totti Nguyen |
ACCV (5) | 3 |
| 2024 | GlitchBench: Can Large Multimodal Models Detect Video Game Glitches?abstractLarge multimodal models (LMMs) have evolved from large language models (LLMs) to integrate multiple input modalities, such as visual inputs. This integration augments the capacity of LLMs for tasks requiring visual comprehen- sion and reasoning. However, the extent and limitations of their enhanced abilities are not fully understood, especially when it comes to real-world tasks. To address this gap, we introduce GlitchBench, a novel benchmark derived from video-game quality assurance tasks, to test and eval- uate the reasoning capabilities of LMMs. Our benchmark is curated from a variety of unusual and glitched scenarios from video games and aims to challenge both the visual and linguistic reasoning powers of LMMs in detecting and inter- preting out-of-the-ordinary events. Our evaluation shows that GlitchBench presents a new, interesting challenge to state-of-the-art LMMs. Code and data are available at: https://glitchbench.github.io/ Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Tianjun Feng, Cor-Paul Bezemer, Anh Totti Nguyen |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2024 | Searching Bug Instances in Gameplay Video RepositoriesabstractGameplay videos offer valuable insights into player interactions and game responses, particularly data about game bugs. Despite the abundance of gameplay videos online, extracting useful information remains a challenge. This paper introduces a method for searching and extracting relevant videos from extensive video repositories using English text queries. Our approach requires no external information, like video metadata; it solely depends on video content. Leveraging the zero-shot transfer capabilities of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, our approach does not require any data labeling or training. To evaluate our approach, we present theGamePhysicsdataset, comprising 26,954 videos from 1,873 games that were collected from the GamePhysics section on the Reddit website. Our approach shows promising results in our extensive analysis of simple and compound queries, indicating that our method is useful for detecting objects and events in gameplay videos. Moreover, we assess the effectiveness of our method by analyzing a carefully annotated dataset of 220 gameplay videos. The results of our study demonstrate the potential of our approach for applications such as the creation of a video search tool tailored to identifying video game bugs, which could greatly benefit Quality Assurance (QA) teams in finding and reproducing bugs. The code and data used in this paper can be found athttps://zenodo.org/records/10211390 Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Finlay Macklon, Sarra Habchi, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
IEEE Trans. Games | 1 |
| 2023 | ImageNet-Hard: The Hardest Images Remaining from a Study of the Power of Zoom and Spatial Biases in Image ClassificationabstractImage classifiers are information-discarding machines, by design. Yet, how these models discard information remains mysterious. We hypothesize that one way for image classifiers to reach high accuracy is to first zoom to the most discriminative region in the image and then extract features from there to predict image labels, discarding the rest of the image. Studying six popular networks ranging from AlexNet to CLIP, we find that proper framing of the input image can lead to the correct classification of 98.91% of ImageNet images. Furthermore, we uncover positional biases in various datasets, especially a strong center bias in two popular datasets: ImageNet-A and ObjectNet. Finally, leveraging our insights into the potential of zooming, we propose a test-time augmentation (TTA) technique that improves classification accuracy by forcing models to explicitly perform zoom-in operations before making predictions.Our method is more interpretable, accurate, and faster than MEMO, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) TTA method. We introduce ImageNet-Hard, a new benchmark that challenges SOTA classifiers including large vision-language models even when optimal zooming is allowed. Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Giang Nguyen 0004, Sarra Habchi, Cor-Paul Bezemer, Anh Totti Nguyen |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2022 | Automatically Detecting Visual Bugs in HTML5 Canvas GamesabstractThe HTML5 is used to display high quality graphics in web applications such as web games (i.e., games). However, automatically testing games is not possible with existing web testing techniques and tools, and manual testing is laborious. Many widely used web testing tools rely on the Document Object Model (DOM) to drive web test automation, but the contents of the are not represented in the DOM. The main alternative approach, snapshot testing, involves comparing oracle snapshot images with test-time snapshot images using an image similarity metric to catch visual bugs, i.e., bugs in the graphics of the web application. However, creating and maintaining oracle snapshot images for games is onerous, defeating the purpose of test automation. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically detect visual bugs in games. By leveraging an internal representation of objects on the , we decompose snapshot images into a set of object images, each of which is compared with a respective oracle asset (e.g., a sprite) using four similarity metrics: percentage overlap, mean squared error, structural similarity, and embedding similarity. We evaluate our approach by injecting 24 visual bugs into a custom game, and find that our approach achieves an accuracy of 100%, compared to an accuracy of 44.6% with traditional snapshot testing. Finlay Macklon, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Markos Viggiato, Stefan Antoszko, Natalia Romanova, Dale Paas, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
ASE | 2 |
| 2022 | CLIP meets GamePhysics: Towards bug identification in gameplay videos using zero-shot transfer learningabstractGameplay videos contain rich information about how players interact with the game and how the game responds. Sharing gameplay videos on social media platforms, such as Reddit, has become a common practice for many players. Often, players will share game-play videos that showcase video game bugs. Such gameplay videos are software artifacts that can be utilized for game testing, as they provide insight for bug analysis. Although large repositories of gameplay videos exist, parsing and mining them in an effective and structured fashion has still remained a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a search method that accepts any English text query as input to retrieve relevant videos from large repositories of gameplay videos. Our approach does not rely on any external information (such as video metadata); it works solely based on the content of the video. By leveraging the zero-shot transfer capabilities of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, our approach does not require any data labeling or training. To evaluate our approach, we present the GamePhysics dataset consisting of 26,954 videos from 1,873 games, that were collected from the GamePhysics section on the Reddit website. Our approach shows promising results in our extensive analysis of simple queries, compound queries, and bug queries, indicating that our approach is useful for object and event detection in gameplay videos. An example application of our approach is as a gameplay video search engine to aid in reproducing video game bugs. Please visit the following link for the code and the data: https://asgaardlab.github.io/CLIPxGamePhysics/ Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Finlay Macklon, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
MSR | 1 |
| 2022 | Visual correspondence-based explanations improve AI robustness and human-AI team accuracyabstractExplaining artificial intelligence (AI) predictions is increasingly important and even imperative in many high-stake applications where humans are the ultimate decision-makers. In this work, we propose two novel architectures of explainable image classifiers that first explain, and then predict (as opposed to post-hoc explanation methods). Our models first rank the training-set images by their distance with the query in an image-level deep feature space. And then, we re-rank the top-50 shortlisted candidates using patch-wise similarity of 5 highest-similarity pairs of patches between the query and every candidate. On ImageNet, our models improve (by 1-4 points) the out-of-distribution accuracy on several datasets including Adversarial Patch and ImageNet-R while performing marginally worse (by 1-2 points) on ImageNet to the baselines (ResNet-50 pre-trained ImageNet). A consistent trend is observed on CUB. Via a large-scale, human study (~60 users per method per dataset) on ImageNet and CUB, we find our proposed correspondence-based explanations led to human-alone image classification accuracy and human-AI team accuracy that are consistently better than those of k-NN. Our correspondence-based explanations help users better correctly reject AI's wrong decisions than all other tested methods.Interestingly, for the first time, we show that it is possible to achieve complementary human-AI team accuracy (i.e. that is higher than either AI-alone or human-alone), in both image classification tasks. Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Giang Nguyen 0004, Anh Totti Nguyen |
NeurIPS | 1 |