I am currently a Research Scientist at Singapore Management University (SMU), working under the guidance of Prof Chong-Wah Ngo. My focus is on culturally aware multimodal Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with reasoning capabilities specific to Southeast Asia.

I obtained my PhD from the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, supported by the SINGA scholarship from the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). My doctoral research focused on Towards Semantic, Debiased and Moment Video Retrieval with Multi-modal Features conducted under the supervision of Prof. Joo Hwee Lim, Dr Hongyuan Zhu and Prof. Hanwang Zhang. During my PhD studies, I had the opportunity to visit the University of Bristol, in the UK, collaborating with Prof. Michael Wray in Dima Damen’s research group. I completed my Master’s degree under the guidance of Prof. Ahmet Emir Dirik, specializing in vehicle detection. My professional experiences span a range of roles, including work at a start-up in Istanbul, Turkish Airlines Technology, and an internship at the University of Valencia. Additionally, I have provided advisory support to two award-winning start-ups located in London and Istanbul.

Recent News

• 08/2025: Another paper is submitted.
• 08/2025: A paper is accepted to EMNLP 2025!
• 03/2025: Started to work as a Research Scientist at SMU.

————————————————————————————————–

Publications

Research during Post-Doctoral Work

Seeing Culture: A Benchmark for Visual Reasoning and Grounding
Burak Satar, Zhixin Ma, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, Wilfried Ariel Mulyawan, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim, Chong-Wah Ngo
EMNLP 2025 Main Conference
Website [arXiv] Code Dataset (links to be updated by 19 Sep)

Title to be updated
Zhixin Ma, Burak Satar, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, Wilfried Ariel Mulyawan, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo
Under review
[arXiv] (link to be updated)

Research during Doctoral Study

PhD Research Topic 3: Multimodal and Generative Video/Moment Retrieval

Video Corpus Moment Retrieval in Long Ego-centric Videos with LLM and Audio Fusion
Burak Satar, Joo Hwee Lim, Hanwang Zhang, M Furkan Ilaslan, Hongyuan Zhu, Michael Wray
(Under development)

VG-TVP: Multimodal Procedural Planning via Visually Grounded Text-Video Prompting
M Furkan Ilaslan, Ali Koksal, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Burak Satar, Mike Zheng Shou, Qianli Xu
AAAI 2025 Full Paper [arXiv] [Dataset Link] [Github]

PhD Research Topic 2: Debiased Text-to-Video Retrieval

Towards Debiasing Frame Length Bias in Text-Video Retrieval via Causal Intervention
Burak Satar, Zhu Hongyuan, Hanwang Zhang, Joo-Hwee Lim
BMVC 2023 Full Paper, (Poster presentation)
[arXiv] [YouTube Ppt] [Poster] [Project Page]

An Overview of Challenges in Egocentric Text-Video Retrieval
Burak Satar, Zhu Hongyuan, Hanwang Zhang, Joo-Hwee Lim
CVPR Workshop 2023, Joint Ego4d/EPIC Workshop (Oral presentation)
[Extended Abstract] [YouTube Ppt]

PhD Research Topic 1: Semantic Text-to-Video Retrieval

(✅ 3rd Place Award) Exploiting Semantic Role Contextualized Video Features
for Multi-Instance Video Retrieval
Burak Satar, Zhu Hongyuan, Hanwang Zhang, Joo-Hwee Lim
CVPR Workshop 2022, Epic-Kitchens-100 MIR Challenge under Joint Ego4d/EPIC Workshop
[Technical Report] [(pseudo)Code]

RoME: Role-aware Mixture-of-Expert Transformer for Text-to-Video Retrieval
Burak Satar, Zhu Hongyuan, Hanwang Zhang, Joo-Hwee Lim
[arXiv 2022 Preprint] [(pseudo)Code]

Semantic Role Aware Correlation Transformer for Text to Video Retrieval
Burak Satar, Zhu Hongyuan, Xavier Bresson, Joo-Hwee Lim
ICIP 2021 Full Paper (Oral presentation) and ICCV Workshop 2021 (Oral presentation)
[arXiv] [(pseudo)Code] [YouTube Ppt]

Research during Master’s Study

Deep Learning Based Vehicle Make-Model Classification
Burak Satar, Ahmet Emir Dirik
ICANN 2018 Full Paper (Oral presentation)
[arXiv] [Code]

————————————————————————————————–

Previous News

• 12/2024: Successfully defended my PhD Thesis.
• 05/2024: Volunteered at ACM Web Conference.
• 10/2023: Visited MaVi Research Group, University of Bristol, for three months under the supervision of Dr Michael Wray on video corpus moment retrieval.
• 05/2023: A poster presentation at Singapore Vision Day at NUS.
• 07/2022: Attended CIFAR DLRL Summer School.
• 06/2022: 3rd Place Award in EPIC-Kitchens Multi-Instance Retrieval Challenge, CVPR.
• 06/2022: Became a finalist in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) @ NTU, representing CCDS.
• 01/2022: Successfully passed my Qualification Exam (QE).
• 12/2021: Volunteered in NeurIPS.
• 07/2021: Attended PAISS AI Summer School, and presented a poster.
• 2020: Started my PhD in the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS), NTU.
• 08/2018: Successfully defended my MSc thesis.
• 06/2018: Got student travel award by European Neural Network Society to attend ICANN.