Dipayan Biswas

I am a machine learning researcher and Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Houston (expected December 2026), advised by Prof. Shishir Shah (now at the University of Oklahoma) and Prof. Jaspal Subhlok. I specialize in multimodal AI: vision-language models, LLM evaluation, and computer vision.

On the NSF-funded VideoPoints platform, I deployed a summarization system that condenses hour-long lectures into 5-minute summaries with supporting visuals, used by 750+ students in 10+ courses. My work also covers object detection in lecture videos, including the LVVO dataset, and fine-tuning VLMs with QLoRA. I have published 5 peer-reviewed IEEE papers.

Previously, I was an Assistant Professor / Lecturer at Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET), Bangladesh, and a Software Engineer at Samsung R&D Institute Bangladesh. I hold an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Houston (May 2026, awarded en route to the Ph.D.) and a B.Sc. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from KUET, where I was University Gold Medalist.

I am graduating in December 2026 and seeking full-time Applied Scientist, Research Scientist, and ML Engineer roles in multimodal AI, vision-language models, and computer vision.

Dipayan Biswas
Ph.D. Candidate
Computer Science
University of Houston

Research Interests

Multimodal AI Vision-Language Models Video Understanding Cross-modal Fusion LLM Evaluation Computer Vision

Technical Skills

AI/MLMultimodal AI, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM Evaluation (LLM-as-judge), Prompt Engineering, Fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA), Computer Vision, Object Detection
FrameworksPyTorch, Hugging Face (Transformers, PEFT, TRL), OpenCV, LiteLLM, LangChain, DeepEval, scikit-learn
Models & APIsGemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemma 3, Qwen3-VL, SigLIP, CLIP, YOLO, Faster R-CNN, DETR
Programming & MLOpsPython, SQL, C++, Git, FastAPI, vLLM, Ollama, MLflow, Slurm, AWS

News

Experience

Graduate Research / Teaching Assistant
University of Houston · Houston, TX
Aug 2021 – Present
Multimodal Video Summarization (NSF-funded VideoPoints platform)
  • Condensed hour-long lectures into 5-minute summaries with supporting visuals for review and navigation, used by 750+ students in 10+ courses; 78% of surveyed students rated them helpful.
  • Designed a multimodal pipeline fusing speech (Whisper), slide text (OCR), and slides with Gemma 3, raising faithfulness by 19% (76.7% to 91.4%) and coverage by 15% in a blind evaluation by 8 faculty.
  • Automated evaluation with an LLM-as-judge (DeepEval) that matched faculty agreement on faithfulness (0.68 vs. 0.59 rank correlation) and reproduced their 19% gain (judge: 18%).
  • Showed that per-slide fusion lifts the coverage gain over transcript-only from 10.6% to 15.0%, beyond run-to-run noise.
  • Developed zero-shot cross-modal selection of supporting visuals with SigLIP and Gemma 3; faculty rated it 82.8% (up from 70.3%) and kept 83% of the selected visuals.
Object Detection in Presentation Videos
  • Released LVVO, a 4,000-frame dataset from 245 videos, planning the labeling guidelines and a multi-annotator protocol with expert conflict resolution (83.4% inter-annotator F1).
  • Raised AP50 from 90.8% to 95.3% with semi-supervised auto-labeling, adding 3x more training frames to 1,000 expert-labeled frames without new manual labeling.
  • Developed a graph-based method merging fragmented detections into coherent visuals, improving mAP by 15.8%.
Machine Learning Fellow
Fellowship.AI · Remote
Sep 2025 – Nov 2025
  • Developed a multimodal listing analyzer (Gemini API) that jointly scores real estate photos and descriptions to recommend pricing, staging, and content improvements across 3k listings.
  • Engineered a weighted-KNN price prediction pipeline with outlier detection over 8K+ Redfin listings, flagging mispriced properties at 85% precision against held-out sale prices.
Assistant Professor / Lecturer
Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET) · Khulna, Bangladesh
Feb 2017 – Aug 2021
  • Taught five undergraduate courses with labs, including Digital Image Processing, and supervised student research projects.
  • Mentored 10+ undergraduates in ML research, co-authoring IEEE papers on plant disease (99.80% accuracy) and breast cancer (99.28%) classification with transfer learning and ensemble methods.
Software Engineer
Samsung R&D Institute Bangladesh (SRBD) · Dhaka, Bangladesh
Jul 2016 – Feb 2017
  • Implemented 360-degree photo and video viewing modes, including panoramic and little-planet views, for the shipped Samsung Gear 360 iOS app using Objective-C, OpenGL ES, and OpenCV.

Selected Projects

Multi-Step LLM and VLM Pipelines
Multi-Step LLM and VLM Pipelines  [Code] Jun 2026 – Sep 2026

Built configurable prompt chaining for multi-step workflows on local or cloud models, with resumable experiments. Made the workflow engine reusable across datasets, saving every step's output for review.

LLM/VLM Workflows Multi-Step Prompting Prompt Engineering Ollama Gemini API Python
Unified Inference Toolkit for Vision-Language Models
Unified Inference Toolkit for Vision-Language Models  [Code] Jun 2026 – Aug 2026

Built one interface for multimodal prompts on 8+ backends, from cloud APIs to vLLM, Ollama, and Hugging Face Transformers. Pre-configured 10+ open LLMs and VLMs, including Gemma 3, Qwen3-VL, and InternVL, each callable by name.

Vision-Language Models LLM LiteLLM vLLM Ollama Hugging Face Transformers Python
VLM Fine-tuning for Visual Question Answering
VLM Fine-tuning for Visual Question Answering  [Code] May 2026 – Jun 2026

Fine-tuned Gemma 3 with QLoRA, raising ChartQA accuracy from 43.6% to 61.6% (4B) and 61.8% to 69.4% (12B). Trained on 28k chart questions using Hugging Face TRL and PEFT on single and multiple L40S GPUs via Slurm.

QLoRA Gemma 3 Hugging Face TRL PEFT ChartQA Slurm
Lecture Video Chaptering with LLMs
Lecture Video Chaptering with LLMs  [Details] Jun 2025 – Aug 2025

Deployed automatic chaptering that splits each newly uploaded lecture into titled chapters; in daily use since Aug 2025. Aligned Whisper transcripts with slide transitions and used Gemini structured output, auto-correcting gaps and overlaps.

Gemini API Structured Output Whisper Tesseract OCR OpenCV Python
Modular Object Detection Training Pipeline
Modular Object Detection Training Pipeline  [Code] Dec 2024 – Feb 2025

Designed a PyTorch codebase for reproducible training and fine-tuning of YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and DETR, with Hydra configs and unified train, evaluate, and predict steps.

PyTorch Object Detection YOLO Faster R-CNN DETR Hydra
Small and Distant Face Detection
Small and Distant Face Detection  [Code] Feb 2023 – May 2023

In a team project, trained and evaluated an IoU-aware RetinaFace with ResNet50 and MobileNet0.25 backbones on 4 V100 GPUs, raising AP on the medium and hard WIDER FACE sets.

PyTorch Face Detection RetinaFace WIDER FACE

Publications  [Google Scholar]

MIPR 2025 thumbnail
D. Biswas, S. Shah, and J. Subhlok
IEEE MIPR 2025

This paper investigates how modern object detectors can be adapted to lecture videos, where visual content is often semantically complex and weakly structured. It shows that YOLO-based transfer learning, combined with semi-supervised dataset enrichment, raises AP50 from 90.8% to 95.3%.

LVVO dataset thumbnail
D. Biswas, S. Shah, and J. Subhlok
arXiv 2025

This work presents LVVO, a dataset for visual object detection in educational videos, with 4,000 frames from 245 lecture videos. Its labels come from a multi-annotator protocol with expert conflict resolution, and it supports both supervised and semi-supervised research.

ISM 2023 thumbnail
D. Biswas, S. Shah, and J. Subhlok
IEEE ISM 2023

This paper presents LogiForm, a graph-based approach for identifying meaningful visual objects in lecture video frames, where slide visuals are often diverse, custom-designed, and composed of parts without clear boundaries. By merging fragmented detections using spatial, color, and local geometric cues, it improves mAP by 15.8%.

Plant Disease Detection thumbnail
I. Z. Mukti and D. Biswas
IEEE EICT 2019

Develops a ResNet50 transfer-learning model for 38-class plant disease detection on PlantVillage, reaching 99.80% accuracy.

Breast Cancer Prediction thumbnail
S. Das and D. Biswas
IEEE ICAEE 2019

Builds a five-classifier voting ensemble for breast cancer prediction, reaching 99.28% accuracy.

Epileptic Seizure Detection thumbnail
D. Biswas and M. F. Hossain
IEEE EICT 2017

Detects epileptic seizures with an artificial neural network (ANN) using selected features of different complexities.

Education

University of Houston  Houston, TX
Ph.D. in Computer Science  |  GPA: 3.88
M.Sc. in Computer Science  |  Awarded May 2026 (en route to the Ph.D.)
Aug 2021 – Dec 2026 (Expected)
Dissertation: Synthesizing Text and Visuals for Multimodal Educational Video Summarization
Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET)  Khulna, Bangladesh
B.Sc. in Electronics and Communication Engineering  |  GPA: 3.88
Apr 2012 – May 2016
🏆 University Gold Medalist (ranked 1st in class)

Certifications & Courses

DeepLearning.AI & AWS
Generative AI with Large Language Models
Coursera
View Certificate →
DeepLearning.AI
Machine Learning in Production
Coursera
View Certificate →
DeepLearning.AI
Building and Evaluating Advanced RAG
Course
View Course →
Amazon Web Services
AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials
Course, AWS Skill Builder

Honors & Awards

  • Ph.D. Research Showcase, Audience's Choice Runner-Up, University of Houston, 2025  [Certificate]
  • Cullen Graduate Student Fellowship, University of Houston, 2021–2026
  • University Gold Medalist (ranked 1st in class), KUET, 2018  [Certificate]

Leadership & Service

Organizing Secretary, Graduate Student Association of Bangladesh, University of Houston
Aug 2022 – Jul 2025
Academic Advisor and Project Mentor, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET)
Feb 2017 – Aug 2021