Mahyar Ghazanfari

About me

I am a PhD student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at George Washington University, advised by Prof. Peng Wei, and a Graduate Research Assistant on the NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI) in the Intelligent Aerospace Systems Lab (IASL). I was a visiting researcher at BAIR, UC Berkeley, hosted by Alexander Bayen and Trevor Darrell, and previously a visiting graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My research sits at the intersection of vision-language models and safe autonomy. I study how multimodal models see, ground, and reason, and use that understanding to build trustworthy systems for aerial autonomy, self-driving, and transportation safety. My work currently follows two lines: (1) safe and trustworthy deployment of package delivery drones, including language-guided delivery and human-robot interaction, and (2) mechanistic interpretability of LLMs, VLMs, and VLAs, including model steering and unlearning.

Before GWU, I received my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology.

Large Language Models Vision-Language Models Mechanistic Interpretability Vision-Language Retrieval Aerial Autonomy Transportation Safety

News (scroll)

Sep 2026:🏆 Our paper "See&Say: Vision Language Guided Safe Zone Detection for Autonomous Package Delivery Drones" received the Best Session Paper award at the IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) 2026. It was also selected as one of the top 10 finalists in the Best Student Paper competition.
Jul 2026:📄 Our paper "A Paragraph is Worth a Thousand Captions" was accepted at the MUCG Workshop @ ECCV 2026.
Jun 2026:📄 Our paper "EO-Agents: A Three-Agent LLM Pipeline for Earth Observation Hypothesis Generation" was accepted at the AI for Science Workshop @ ICML 2026.
May 2026:🐻 Joined BAIR, UC Berkeley as a visiting researcher, hosted by Alexander Bayen and Trevor Darrell.
Sep 2025:🐢 Started as a visiting graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park.
May 2025:🏆 Our paper "Chain-of-Thought Flight Planner: End-to-End LLM routing under wind hazards" received the Best Paper Award at the AIAA Aviation Forum 2025.
Sep 2024:🎓 Started my PhD at George Washington University.

Selected Publications

Full list on Google Scholar.

AIAA SciTech

Air Traffic Control Using Large Language Models: Prompt Engineering, Architecture, and Evaluation

Mahyar Ghazanfari, Matthias Casanova, Jordan Kam, Alex Zongo, Peng Wei, Torsten Darrell, Alexandre Bayen

AIAA SciTech Forum, 2027

arXiv Code

ICML-W

End-to-End LLM Flight Planning with RAG-based Memory and Multi-modal Coach Agent

Amin Tabrizian, Arsyi Aziz, Aarifah Ullah, Mahyar Ghazanfari, Pouria Razzaghi, Peng Wei

LM4Plan Workshop @ ICML, 2026

arXiv Code

AIAA Aviation

Towards Automated Air Traffic Safety Assessment Around Non-Towered Airports Using Large Language Models

Torsten Darrell, Mahyar Ghazanfari, Jordan Kam, Alexandre Bayen, Amin Tabrizian, Peng Wei

AIAA Aviation Forum, 2026

arXiv Code

AIAA Aviation

Chain-of-Thought Flight Planner: End-to-End LLM routing under wind hazards

Amin Tabrizian, Mahyar Ghazanfari, Peng Wei

AIAA Aviation Forum and ASCEND, 2025 Best Paper Award

Paper Code

ECCV-W

A Paragraph is Worth a Thousand Captions: Rethinking Text Supervision for Vision-Language Retrieval

Mahyar Ghazanfari, Amin Tabrizian, Arsyi Aziz, Binshuai Wang, Peng Wei

MUCG Workshop @ ECCV, 2026

arXiv Code

ICML-W

EO-Agents: A Three-Agent LLM Pipeline for Earth Observation Hypothesis Generation

Mahyar Ghazanfari, Amin Tabrizian, Armin Mehrabian, Peng Wei

AI for Science Workshop @ ICML, 2026

arXiv Code

DASC

See&Say: Vision Language Guided Safe Zone Detection for Autonomous Package Delivery Drones

Mahyar Ghazanfari, Peng Wei

IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), 2026 Best Session Paper Best Student Paper Finalist

arXiv Code

Education

Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

George Washington University, Washington, DC · Advisor: Prof. Peng Wei

Sep 2024 to present (expected 2028)

B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering

Sharif University of Technology, Tehran · Advisors: Prof. Babak Khalaj and Prof. Ali Fotowat

Sep 2019 to Sep 2024

Research Experience

Visiting Researcher, BAIR, UC Berkeley

Hosts: Prof. Alexander Bayen and Prof. Trevor Darrell

May 2026 to Aug 2026

Visiting Graduate Student, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland

College Park, MD

Sep 2025 to Jan 2026

Graduate Research Assistant, NASA University Leadership Initiative

Intelligent Aerospace Systems Lab, George Washington University

Sep 2024 to present

Honors & Awards

Outstanding Reviewer Award, Privacy, Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Computer Vision Workshop (PFATCV) @ ECCV 2026 (certificate)
Best Session Paper, IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) 2026, for "See&Say: Vision Language Guided Safe Zone Detection for Autonomous Package Delivery Drones"
Top 10 Finalist, Best Student Paper Competition, IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) 2026
Best Paper Award, AIAA Aviation Forum 2025, for "Chain-of-Thought Flight Planner: End-to-End LLM routing under wind hazards"

Academic Service

Reviewer

Journal: AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (JAIS)
Symposium: AAAI Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development (UR-RAD), 2026
Workshops: ECCV 2026 (MUCG, PFATCV, eXCV); ICML 2026 (SCALE)