Arash Akbari

I am a PhD student in Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Yanzhi Wang. I work on vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models, with a focus on making physical AI more efficient and practical to deploy in the real world.

I earned my M.S. in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University and my B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Tehran. I have also been a research intern at CNRS with Timothée Masquelier and at CISPA with Xiao Zhang.

Feel free to reach out via email if you’d like to discuss research or potential collaborations.

News

May 21, 2026	Our paper Cross-Platform Scaling of Vision-Language-Action Models from Edge to Cloud GPUs was accepted at GLSVLSI 2026.
Apr 01, 2026	Earned my M.S. in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, with a concentration in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Algorithms (CVLA), along the way to my Ph.D.
Aug 01, 2025	Our paper Beyond Overall Accuracy: Pose- and Occlusion-driven Fairness Analysis in Pedestrian Detection for Autonomous Driving was accepted at IEEE ITSC 2025.
Mar 15, 2025	Our paper Moxin-LLM was accepted to SCI-FM @ ICLR’25.
Sep 01, 2024	Started my direct PhD in Computer Engineering at Northeastern University with Prof. Yanzhi Wang.

Selected Publications see all publications

Preprint

Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models

Arman Akbari, Ci Zhang, Arash Akbari, Lin Zhao, Yixiao Chen, Weiwei Chen, Xuan Zhang, Geng Yuan, and Yanzhi Wang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.05254, 2026

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Preprint

ActQuant: Sub-4-bit Action-Guided Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Masih Eskandar, Qitao Tan, Yixiao Chen, Jingwu Luo, Bertha Pangaribuan, Liyun Zhang, Jennifer Dy, Geng Yuan, Xue Lin, Gaowen Liu, Stratis Ioannidis, and Yanzhi Wang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24011, 2026

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Preprint

PhyGround: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning in Generative World Models

Juyi Lin^*, Arash Akbari^*, Yumei He, Lin Zhao, Haichao Zhang, Arman Akbari, Xingchen Xu, Zoe Y. Lu, Enfu Nan, Hokin Deng, Edmund Yeh, Sarah Ostadabbas, Yun Fu, Jennifer Dy, Pu Zhao, and Yanzhi Wang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.10806, 2026

PDF Code Website
GLSVLSI

Cross-Platform Scaling of Vision-Language-Action Models from Edge to Cloud GPUs

Amir Taherin, Juyi Lin, Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, Pu Zhao, Weiwei Chen, David Kaeli, and Yanzhi Wang

In ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI), 2026

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Tech Report

Open-Source Multimodal Moxin Models with Moxin-VLM and Moxin-VLA

Pu Zhao, Arash Akbari, Xuan Shen, Zhenglun Kong, Yumei Shen, Sung-En Chang, Timothy Rupprecht, Lei Lu, Enfu Nan, and others

2025

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ITSC

Beyond Overall Accuracy: Pose- and Occlusion-driven Fairness Analysis in Pedestrian Detection for Autonomous Driving

Mohammad Khoshkdahan, Arman Akbari, Arash Akbari, and Xuan Zhang

In IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2025

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ICLR

7B Fully Open Source Moxin-LLM – From Pretraining to GRPO-based Reinforcement Learning Enhancement

Pu Zhao, Xuan Shen, Zhenglun Kong, Yixin Shen, Sung-En Chang, Arash Akbari, Timothy Rupprecht, Lei Lu, Enfu Nan, Changdi Yang, and others

In SCI-FM @ ICLR Workshop, 2025

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ICEE

A 2D Geometry Based Grasping Pose Generation Algorithm for a Two-Finger Robot Hand

Arash Akbari, Arman Akbari, and Mehdi Tale Masouleh

Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE), 2023

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