Amir Salarpour

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Computing at Clemson University, affiliated with TigerSec Lab, where I work with Prof. Mert D. Pesé on security, robustness, and trustworthiness of autonomous-vehicle perception systems. My research focuses on adversarial sensing, physical-world and black-box attacks, vision-language models for autonomous driving, and robust 3D point-cloud perception.

Previously, I was a Visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CyLab) in 2023, supervised by Prof. Raj Rajkumar, and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Sirjan University of Technology from 2018 to 2022, where I also served as Department Chair.

My broader goal is to build perception systems that remain reliable under adversarial conditions, distribution shifts, and real-world sensing uncertainty.

Research Interests

• Secure and Robust Autonomous Perception: adversarial sensing, physical-world and black-box attacks, robust AV perception pipelines, evaluation, and defense
• Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving: VLM robustness, adversarial evaluation, multimodal reasoning, and test-time adaptation
• 3D Computer Vision and Point Clouds: classification, segmentation, registration, 3D detection and tracking, and geometric deep learning
• Trustworthy Machine Learning: adversarial robustness, data-efficient training, uncertainty estimation, and reliable deployment of perception systems

Teaching

Instructor of Record — Clemson University

• CPSC 8580 — Security in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems (Spring 2025)
• CPSC 4200/6200 — Computer Security Principles (Spring 2026)

Prior teaching — Sirjan University of Technology (Assistant Professor, 2018–2022)

• Graduate: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing, Advanced AI
• Undergraduate: Advanced Programming, Algorithms, AI, ML, Internet Engineering, Software Engineering

News

• [May 2026] Paper accepted at IEEE ICIP 2026:
  “Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection”

• [Mar 2026] Paper accepted at DSN 2026:
  “From MIRAGE to CLEAR: Component-Level Explainable Anomaly Reasoning for Autonomous Vehicle Perception Systems”

• [Mar 2026] Three papers accepted to the CVPR 2026 Workshops / 6th AdvML Workshop:
  • “Interpretable Adversarial Prompt Tuning via Semantic Concepts”
  • “SASA: Sequence-Aware Shadow Attacks via Attention Alignment for Traffic Sign Recognition”
  • “Auditing Traffic-Sign Robustness via DDIM Inversion: Do Diffusion Latents Preserve Shadow Attacks?”

• [Jan 2026] Paper accepted at ICRA 2026:
  “SLNet: A Super-Lightweight Geometry-Adaptive Network for 3D Point Cloud Recognition”

• [Jan 2026] Three papers accepted at IEEE IV 2026:
  • “NPNet: A Non-Parametric Network with Adaptive Gaussian-Fourier Positional Encoding for 3D Classification and Segmentation”
  • “Comparative Analysis of Patch Attack on VLM-Based Autonomous Driving Architectures”
  • “Toward Inherently Robust VLMs Against Visual Perception Attacks”

• [Jan 2026] Received the Best Paper Award for the SAE/WCX 2025 paper:
  “Avoiding the Crash: A Vision-Language Model Evaluation of Critical Traffic Scenarios”

• [2025–2026] Key personnel on a U.S. DOT UTC TraCR project:
  Resilient Autonomous Vehicle Perception Under Adversarial Settings

Publications

Services

Program Committees & Conference Reviewing

• ICRA (2026)
• IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) (2025, 2026)
• USENIX VehicleSec (2025, 2026)
• AAAI (2025)
• BMVC (2025)
• ACM CCS (2024)
• IEEE/RSJ IROS (2023)

Journal Peer Review

• Verified reviews (Web of Science): 117
• Selected journals: IEEE TIFS; IEEE TIP; IEEE TCSVT; IEEE TMM; IEEE T-ASE; IEEE TVT; IEEE SPL; IEEE Intelligent Systems; IEEE CG&A; IEEE T-CE; Digital Threats: Research and Practice; IET Image Processing; CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology; Science China Technological Sciences; Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing; Sensors; IEEE Access

Leadership & Event Service

• Department Chair, Computer Science, Sirjan University of Technology (Mar. 2020 – Dec. 2022)
• Director, International Academic Cooperation, Sirjan University of Technology (Jun. 2021 – Apr. 2022)
• Academic Chair, National Conference of Ideas and Innovation in Business and Information Technology (NCIBIT) (2019, 2021, 2022)

Professional Memberships

• IEEE (Graduate Student Member)
• IEEE Young Professionals
• ACM (Professional Member)

Contact

Email: asalarp@clemson.edu
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PPyF4hEAAAAJ&hl=en
GitHub: https://github.com/asalarpour

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