Kartik Narayan

I am a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at Johns Hopkins University, where I am a member of VIU lab, advised by Dr.Vishal Patel. My current interests lies in multimodal LLMs, agents, reasoning and video generation. My prior research focused on computer vision and its applications in face analysis, understanding, and recognition, with a particular emphasis on multimodal LLMs.

Currently in my Ph.D., I have been fortunate to intern at:

Apple (Navid Shiee, Peter Grasch, Chao Jia, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan): Empowering Multimodal LLMs in Multimodal Agentic WebSearch.

Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked as an undergraduate researcher under Prof. Richa Singh and Prof. Mayank Vatsa at the Image Analysis and Biometrics (IAB) Lab, IIT Jodhpur, where I worked on deepfake video generation.

Email / CV / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Twitter / Github

Research

My current research interests are multimodal LLMs, agents, reasoning and video generation. My prior research focused on computer vision and its applications in face analysis, understanding, and recognition, with the goal of developing robust open-world algorithms that can be deployed for real-world impact.

News

[June, 2025] One Paper is accepted at ICCV 2025.
[May, 2025] Research Intern at Apple for Summer 2025.
[April, 2025] Two Papers are accepted at FG 2025.
[December, 2024] One Paper is accepted at AAAI 2025.
[October, 2024] One Paper is accepted at WACV 2025.
[October, 2024] One Paper is accepted at IEEE TBIOM.
[January, 2024] One Paper is accepted at FG 2024.
[August, 2023] Joined as a PhD student at VIU Lab, Johns Hopkins University.
[May, 2023] Received CVPR Student Travel Award.
[Feb, 2023] One Paper is Accepted at CVPR 2023.
[September, 2022] One Paper is Accepted at IEEE Access.
[August, 2022] One Paper is Accepted at IJCB 2022.
[April, 2022] One Paper is Accepted at CVPRW TCV 2022.
[January, 2022] One Paper is Accepted at IEEE SysCon 2022.

Publications

See my Google Scholar profile for the complete and most recent publications.
Representative papers are highlighted.

	DeepMMSearch-R1: Empowering Multimodal LLMS in Mulitmodal Web Search Kartik Narayan, Yang Xu, Tian Cao, Kavya Nerella, Vishal M. Patel, Navid Shiee, Peter Grasch, Chao Jia, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan Under Review arXiv

	FaceXFormer: A Unified Transformer for Facial Analysis Kartik Narayan, Vibashan VS, Rama Chellappa, Vishal M. Patel ICCV 2025 arXiv / project / code (291 ⭐)

	SegFace: Face Segmentation of Long-Tail Classes Kartik Narayan, Vibashan VS, Vishal M. Patel AAAI 2025 arXiv / project / code (84 ⭐)

	FaceXBench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Face Understanding Kartik Narayan, Vibashan VS, Vishal M. Patel Under Review arXiv / project / code
	PETALface: Parameter Efficient Transfer Learning for Low-resolution Face Recognition Kartik Narayan, Nithin Gopalkrishnan Nair, Jennifer Xu, Rama Chellappa, Vishal M. Patel WACV 2025 (Oral) arXiv / project / code

	FaceMoE: Mixture of Experts for Low-Resolution Face Recognition Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel Under Review paper

	Training-Free Stylized Abstraction Aiman Rahman, Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel Under Review arXiv / project / code

	RestoreVAR: Visual Autoregressive Generation for All-in-One Image Restoration Sudarshan Rajagoplan, Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel Under Review arXiv / project / code

	INFER: Implicit Neural Features for Exposing Realism Dhananjaya Jayasundara, Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel Under Review paper

	TransFIRA: Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment Allen Tu, Kartik Narayan, Joshua Gleason, Jennifer Xu, Matthew Meyn, Tom Goldstein, Vishal M. Patel Under Review arXiv

	Investigating Social Biases in Multimodal LLMs Malsha Perera, Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) 2025 paper

	Improved Representation Learning for Unconstrained Face Recognition Nithin Gopalkrishnan Nair, Kartik Narayan, Maitreya Suin, Ram Prabhakar, Jennifer Xu, Soraya Stevens, Joshua Gleason, Nathan Shnidman, Rama Chellappa, Vishal M. Patel IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) 2025 paper

	Hyp-OC: Hyperbolic One Class Classification for Face Anti-Spoofing Kartik Narayan, Vishal M. Patel IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) 2024 paper / project / code

	DF-Platter: Multi-subject Heterogeneous Deepfake Dataset Kartik Narayan, Harsh Agarwal, Kartik Thakral, Surbhi Mittal, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh CVPR 2023 paper / poster

	DeePhyNet: Towards Detecting Phylogeny in Deepfakes Kartik Thakral, Harsh Agarwal, Kartik Narayan, Surbhi Mittal, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (T-BIOM) paper

	DeePhy: On Deepfake Phylogeny Kartik Narayan, Harsh Agarwal, Kartik Thakral, Surbhi Mittal, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) 2022 (Oral) paper

	DeSI: Deepfake Source Identifier for Social Media Kartik Narayan, Harsh Agarwal, Surbhi Mittal, Kartik Thakral, Suman Kundu, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh CVPR Workshops 2022 paper

Template credits. Last updated October 2025.