Research Assistant · NTNU, Norway

Abdul Manaf

AI Researcher & Engineer · Computer Vision, VLMs & LLM Systems

I'm a Research Assistant at NTNU in Gjøvik, Norway. My research centres on vision-language models for medical imaging, with a focus on grounding, factual reliability, and clinical usefulness. I also build retrieval-augmented and agentic LLM systems and take them through to deployment.

Abdul Manaf in the Norwegian mountains above a fjord Medical VLMsRAG · Agentic AI
Preikestolen, Norway
Publications
8
Q1 journal articles
4
Scholar citations
140+
Current affiliation
NTNU

Research

What I work on

My MS thesis introduced an ROI-guided multimodal pipeline for generating lesion descriptions from medical images. It benchmarked MedFlamingo, MedLLaVA, MedGemma, and Qwen2-VL under full fine-tuning, LoRA, and zero-shot settings. The study found architecture-dependent effects of region guidance and a consistent gap between semantic similarity and factual correctness, which standard metrics often hide.

Earlier work spans fracture detection in pediatric radiographs, self-supervised transformers for chest X-rays, explainable aerial-image analysis for flood response, and cross-lingual evaluation of LLMs.

  • Vision-language models for medicine

    Region-grounded report and lesion description generation; parameter-efficient adaptation of medical VLMs.

  • Trustworthy & explainable AI

    Measuring factual correctness beyond surface similarity; saliency and LIME-based explanations.

  • RAG & agentic LLM systems

    Domain-grounded retrieval pipelines, multi-agent workflows, and evaluation of faithfulness and relevance.

  • Detection in clinical imaging

    YOLO-family detectors and CNN/transformer classifiers for radiograph abnormality detection.

Skills

Tools & techniques

Full skill list
  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • Hugging Face
  • YOLO / Ultralytics
  • OpenAI GPT
  • Gemini
  • LLaMA
  • Mistral
  • LangChain
  • Jupyter
  • React
  • Node.js
  • FastAPI
  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • AWS
  • n8n
  • Vercel
  • Git
  • GitHub
  • Vision-Language Models
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  • Agentic AI
  • LoRA / Fine-tuning
  • CNNs
  • Medical Imaging
  • Object Detection
  • GANs & Diffusion
  • Vision Transformers
  • Explainable AI
  • LLM Evaluation
  • Prompt Engineering
  • NLP

Updates

Recent news

  • Joined NTNU as a Research Assistant, extending and deploying the EduRAG system on AWS.

  • Cross-lingual LLM sentiment study published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.

  • Self-supervised Swin-B chest X-ray study published in IEEE Access.

  • Completed my MS in Computer Science at Sukkur IBA University.

  • First-author paper on post-flood aerial image classification published in IEEE Access.

  • Began a fully funded research exchange at NTNU through the NORPART-CONNECT project.

Publications

Selected papers

All publications
  1. First authorQ1

    Aerial Image Classification in Post-Flood Scenarios Using Robust Deep Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

    A. Manaf, N. Mughal, K. R. Talpur, B. A. Talpur, G. Mujtaba, S. R. Talpur

    IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 35973–35984, 2025

  2. Q1

    Enhancing Wrist Abnormality Detection with YOLO: Analysis of State-of-the-Art Single-Stage Detection Models

    A. Ahmed, A. S. Imran, A. Manaf, Z. Kastrati, S. M. Daudpota

    Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, vol. 93, 106144, 2024

  3. Q1

    Do Language Families Matter? Evaluating LLMs for Sentiment Analysis Through a Hierarchical Cross-Lingual Lens

    M. Kastrati, A. Manaf, A. S. Imran, Z. Kastrati, S. M. Daudpota, M. Biba

    Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 9, 1854873, 2026

Projects

Featured work

All projects
EduRAG homepageDevelopment2025–26

LLMs · RAG · Platform

EduRAG

Course-aware student support grounded in each course's slides, notes, and textbooks. Benchmarks GPT, Gemini, LLaMA, Mistral, and DeepSeek; deployed on AWS at NTNU.

Pediatric wrist abnormality detection web appResearch2024

Medical AI · Detection

Pediatric Wrist Abnormality Detection

YOLOv8 system for fractures and other wrist abnormalities in pediatric radiographs. 0.95 mAP on fractures; published in BSPC.

EcoFibra homepageClient2026

Client · Textiles · Italy

EcoFibra

Website for a textile sourcing firm in Biella, Italy: recycled and sustainable fibre catalogue, live commodity ticker, and quote requests.

Wulmy homepageDevelopment2026

Full-stack · EdTech

Wulmy

Study-abroad platform for English-taught medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy in Italy, from eligibility checks to visa and enrolment.

Pediatric chest X-ray pneumonia classifierResearch2025

Medical AI · Classification

Pediatric Pneumonia Detection

CNN classifier for pediatric chest X-rays, using GAN-based augmentation to balance scarce clinical data.

CortexTest homepageDevelopment2025

LLMs · EdTech

CortexTest: LLM Assessment Platform

Exam-assessment platform that combines OCR and LLM analysis to grade answers and produce detailed feedback.

Let's talk research.

I'm looking for PhD positions in computer vision, medical AI, and multimodal learning. If your group works on these problems, I'd be glad to hear from you.