Safal Thapaliya

Safal Thapaliya

PhD student, UConn
LLMs, GNNs, AI for healthcare.

safal.thapaliya[at]uconn.edu · scholar · linkedIn · github · cv

bio

I’m a second year PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut working on large language models, graph neural networks, and AI for healthcare. Before UConn, I built healthcare AI prototypes and vision-language segmentation models at NAAMII in Nepal.

I love to play football (not the american one) and watch any sports that I find interesting.

Aug, 2026
Where LLM Annotators Fail: Label-Free Learning on Graphs with LLMs accepted at EMNLP Findings 2026.
Jan, 2025
Joined MINDS lab at University of Connecticut. Advised by Prof. Chuxu Zhang.
Dec, 2024
Presented TuneVLSeg at ACCV 2024.
2022–2024
Research assistant at NAAMII’s TOGAI lab under Dr. Bishesh Khanal. Worked on vision-language models, medical image segmentation, and object detection; shipped healthcare AI prototypes alongside KIAS and Dr. Taman Upadhaya.
2022
Solutions Intern at Logpoint on Linux server administration and distributed log handling.
2019–2022
Founding developer at Clamphook.
2018–2022
B.E. in Computer Engineering from IOE, Pulchowk Campus.

publications

* indicates equal contribution

Where LLM Annotators Fail: Label-Free Learning on Graphs with LLMs EMNLP Findings 2026

Safal Thapaliya, Jiatan Huang, Chuxu Zhang

Semantic Refinement with LLMs for Graph Representations arXiv pre-print 2025

Safal Thapaliya*, Zehong Wang*, Jiazheng Li, Ziming Li, Yanfang Ye, Chuxu Zhang

TuneVLSeg: Prompt Tuning Benchmark for Vision-Language Segmentation Models ACCV 2024 (Oral)

Rabin Adhikari, Safal Thapaliya, Manish Dhakal, Bishesh Khanal

Vlsm-adapter: Finetuning vision-language segmentation efficiently with lightweight blocks MICCAI 2024

Manish Dhakal, Rabin Adhikari, Safal Thapaliya, Bishesh Khanal

Exploring Transfer Learning in Medical Image Segmentation using VLMs MIDL 2024 (Oral)

Kanchan Poudel*, Manish Dhakal*, Prasiddha Bhandari*, Rabin Adhikari*, Safal Thapaliya*, Bishesh Khanal

Deep-learning assisted detection and quantification of (oo)cysts of Giardia and Cryptosporidium on smartphone microscopy images Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging 2024

Suprim Nakarmi, Sanam Pudasaini, Safal Thapaliya, Pratima Upretee, Retina Shrestha, Basant Giri, Bhanu Bhakta Neupane, Bishesh Khanal

For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar.